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Which Dell Perc for my array?

C

Citizen _insane

Gawd
Joined
May 2, 2006
Messages
565
Took advantage of the BB sale today and picked up 2 more 2tb WD Green drives. I'm looking into getting a dell Perc card so I can run hardware RAID 5 (maybe eventually upgrade to 6).

My specs are in my sig, can anyone tell me which card I should be shopping for? It looks like some of them are not compatible with win7? Anyone have a suggestion?
 
Green drives don't work well with perc cards in RAID.

I'd highly suggest not going that direction. Look into going to drive pooling software like drive bender, and using a plain old boring HBA, or just the ports on the motherboard.
 
hotcrandel said:
Green drives don't work well with perc cards in RAID.

I'd highly suggest not going that direction. Look into going to drive pooling software like drive bender, and using a plain old boring HBA, or just the ports on the motherboard.
Click to expand...

Why do you say that? These are the only drives I've found for a reasonable price, so I'm not super keen on selling them and moving to a more expensive setup.

To be clear, I don't really need the speed. I mainly am interested in RAID 5 for stability (recently had some drives die and lost a ton of data).

edit: From searching quick it seems people are using these drives successfully with Perc6i's.
 
probably a perc6 if you don't want to spend a ton. perc5's are available, but the speed has always been a little iffy on those. You'll either need a fan on the card, or putting a bigger heatsink on it.
 
I have two arrays each with perc 5i's and 8 WD Green drives running for over 8 months 24/7 with no issues. Server OS was 2008R2 but I upgraded to 2012. Can't speak to Win 7 support.
 
A PERC5 should be plenty powerful enough to handle a single RAID5.. especially when you are talking about SOHO SATA drives. If you are worried about RAID rebuild time or loss of data with a power outtage, just be sure you get one with a battery backup, and at least 512MB onboard memory.

As for WD drives.. I've had mixed results with these. You have to realize, until WD bought Hitachi's disk manufacturing division in the last year, they did not make true enterprise grade drives, so there really was no reason for enterprise RAID controller manufacturers to make sure WD drives were compatible. That said, I have successfully used WD SATA drives on PERC SAS controllers. Where I came across issues was with IBM ServeRAID controllers.. in particular the 8k series.. these have all sorts of issues with WD drives.

On a side note, and one that I thought was pretty funny... I work with a few Hitachi SANs, and since the recent sale of the disk division to WD, I would have thought they would have worked out a deal where Hitachi would use the WD drives... but no.. the last few drive failures we had, Hitachi replaced them with Seagates!!!! lol.
 
I will not use RAID-5 with consumer SATA bigger than 1TB.

You better have good backup.
 
I'd imagine part of it is consumer drives tend not to last in raid arrays as long, consumer drives tend not to last as long as enterprise drives, and when one does fail when you do the rebuild it stresses the good drives in the array leading to a higher likelihood of a 2nd drive failing and your array going bye bye. (holy run on sentence). The larger the drives, the longer the rebuild takes, longer high stress times.
 
Its about risk, in my case, the two arrays act as backups, so I still have the data in its primary location, the risk for me is less then if the arrays were my primary data source.

Generally speaking its not best practice to use consumer drives in an array due to the fact that consumer drives are less robust then their enterprise bretheren, but of course its up to you what to use.

Many people have had mixed results with the WD Green, issues such as drives dropping out of arrays etc, I personally never experienced any of those issues and I had many of them running in QNAP NAS, but thats just me.

If your data is important then does it make sense to cheap out on drives for your array? In my case, I already had the drives, so I just repurposed them. In the end, its up to you, the advice here is just that its not the best idea to use them for the reasons I've mentioned.
 
Citizen _insane said:
Why? Please guys, this is my first array so I'd like an explanation not just being told what to do.
Click to expand...

Green drives have a lot of power saving features which may cause abnormal wearing on the drives as they are used in RAID arrays.

Green drives also have a "Deep Recovery" feature which interferes with RAID operation.

Here is a quote from an email from WD Support;

"Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Service and Support. My name is Joan R.

Is this NAS device working on a RAID? If so, Western Digital manufactures desktop edition hard drives (Caviar Green) and RAID Edition hard drives. Each type of hard drive is designed to work specifically in either a desktop computer environment or a demanding enterprise environment.

If you install and use a desktop edition hard drive connected to a RAID controller, the drive may not work correctly unless jointly qualified by an enterprise OEM. This is caused by the normal error recovery procedure that a desktop edition hard drive uses.

When an error is found on a desktop edition hard drive, the drive will enter into a deep recovery cycle to attempt to repair the error, recover the data from the problematic area, and then reallocate a dedicated area to replace the problematic area. This process can take up to 2 minutes depending on the severity of the issue. Most RAID controllers allow a very short amount of time for a hard drive to recover from an error. If a hard drive takes too long to complete this process, the drive will be dropped from the RAID array. Most RAID controllers allow from 7 to 15 seconds for error recovery before dropping a hard drive from an array. Western Digital does not recommend installing desktop edition hard drives in an enterprise environment (on a RAID controller).

Western Digital RAID edition hard drives have a feature called TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) which stops the hard drive from entering into a deep recovery cycle. The hard drive will only spend 7 seconds to attempt to recover. This means that the hard drive will not be dropped from a RAID array. Though TLER is designed for RAID environments, it is fully compatible and will not be detrimental when used in non-RAID environments.

I hope that we have met your expectations today and that you are satisfied with our service. If you have any further questions, please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you further.

Sincerely,
Joan R.
Western Digital Service and Support
"
Click to expand...

You can roll the dice with green drives and PERC cards, but in my opinion its not worth your time.
 
Citizen _insane said:
Why? Please guys, this is my first array so I'd like an explanation not just being told what to do.
Click to expand...

Because cheap consumer SATA has lower Non Recoverable Error Rate, usually at 2^14, which mean in 2^14 bits, you will get error.

In a RAID-5 array, when one disk fails and you need to rebuild it, let's say you use 2 TB disk, your rebuild will fail.

I've tested it twice with Hitachi 5K3000 3TB disks, every time rebuild fails at about 50%.
 
Okay, well the drives I have have not been opened so I can sell them. What should I look for? I only really need maybe 2tb of backed up storage. Should I get 4 1tb drives and run them in RAID 0+1 or RAID 6?

Or should I just run 2 Green drives in software RAID 1 and use Amazon Glacier as a secondary backup?
 
Last edited:
Two (or three if you're paranoid), single 2/3TB drives.

Put one in your computer/server

Stick the second in an external enclosure. Use a sync program to back it up too over USB/Firewire/ESATA.

Unplug / Turn off your second disk and back up to it once a week.

If you have a third disk, also in an external enclosure, back up to it once a month and keep it at work in a drawer, at your parents house, etc.
 
I supposed I could just set up an automated backup to my other PC so that the files would be synced across 2 separate boxes. That way if a sata controller goes out and takes all my drives with it...cough..MSI P67 style...cough... there would less of a chance of data being lost.
 
I would say very little chance. I had good luck with a setup like that for years.

Its really great if your server shits the bed, you can pull the data disks out and plug them into a different server.

Trying to recover failed RAID arrays is a bear, and its usually just less painful to burn the thing down and pull it from backups.

I feel like I'm spoiling your fun, but I'm trying to give you genuine advice that will save you head-aches in the future.
 
hotcrandel said:
I would say very little chance. I had good luck with a setup like that for years.

Its really great if your server shits the bed, you can pull the data disks out and plug them into a different server.

Trying to recover failed RAID arrays is a bear, and its usually just less painful to burn the thing down and pull it from backups.

I feel like I'm spoiling your fun, but I'm trying to give you genuine advice that will save you head-aches in the future.
Click to expand...

Thanks hotcrandel. I appreciate you taking the time to educate me on this. I'll probably just go with a remote backup system then. Sounds like it's not worth the money to move to a RAID array.
 
As someone mentioned in this thread, raid is not a backup. Be sure to have a copy of your data somewhere else.
 
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