Which drives for home RAID?

E

evildre

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Oct 23, 2000
Messages
13,345
Hey all, I've got some old drives in my desktop at home, which isn't a problem in and of itself; the problem is that I'm running out of disk space. So ... it may be time to get some new drives.

As it stands, I have five hard disks in my machine: one PATA 250GB Seagate, two SATA 320GB Seagates (RAID 1), and two SATA 500GB Seagates (RAID 1). I don't remember the model numbers off-hand, but I do know that I've had all of these disks for 3-5 years. I'm running both RAIDs on a Highpoint RocketRAID 2300 card.

Based on my experiences with single-drive systems, I promised myself that I would never store my data on a single hard disk again, hence the RAID 1s. I have no problems throwing the OS and apps on a single disk, though. To that end, I'm looking for 4 drives for data storage and 1 for OS/apps. Ideally, the 4 disks would be identical models and sizes, and the 1 disk would be bigger than 250GB. I don't want to spend a ton of money, so that combination of capacity and price rules out SSD for the boot drive; for the RAID(s) I'm looking for capacity over performance. 1TB drives are okay here, but I can go bigger if the price is right.

A little background ... I'm running two RAIDs in my office workstation (4x 750GB RAID 10, 2x 1TB RAID 1), but these are on the built-in Intel controller. The RAID 10 is made up of four Seagate 7200.12 drives, and the RAID 1 is a pair of WD Blacks with TLER enabled. The WD Blacks have been in a RAID 1, operating almost 24/7 for nearly a year now; the Seagate RAID 10 has been working fine since February. Recently we ordered three i7 workstations with four 1TB Samsung F3s in RAID 1 each, running on the Intel controllers built into their Gigabyte X58A-UD3R boards. These have been working well, but we got them about a month ago so I really don't know how they will hold up in the long run.

So, with the above in mind, which drives are currently the best for home RAID setups?
 
The problem is that your hardware RAID controller and most Windows-based software RAID solutions require TLER-capable disks to avoid bad things on a simple bad sector or timeout on your drives.

There's not much options though; look at TLER capable disks or evaluate another setup avoiding the Highpoint controller. Focus on a good backup system and you may even use non-TLER disks, causing some downtime if the drives even but scratch their bums. So it's either pay or suffer the consequences. :D

As for drives, the EADS should be good. EARS on Windows might make sense, but look into the 4K sector issue a bit. Newest generation HDDs use 666GB-per-platter (love that number) - and if you store mainly large files then 5400rpm would be recommended; they require no active cooling and less heat and sound is a good thing.
 
Hmm ... I bought the HighPoint to avoid using Matrix RAID and, in a nutshell, now I need Matrix RAID to get decently-sized drives? Wow. I think that makes me an even sadder panda LOL
 
evildre said:
Hmm ... I bought the HighPoint to avoid using Matrix RAID and, in a nutshell, now I need Matrix RAID to get decently-sized drives?
Click to expand...
No you read sub.mesa's post wrong: He recommended the following drives since they can be modified apparently to support TLER and therefore work well in a Windows RAID environment:
$88 - Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB SATA Drive
$140 - Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EADS 2TB SATA Drive

That's what sub.mesa meant by "EADS" drives: that's the hard drive line. I'm fairly sure 1TB and 2TB drives are decently-sized drives.
 
Danny Bui said:
No you read sub.mesa's post wrong: He recommended the following drives since they can be modified apparently to support TLER and therefore work well in a Windows RAID environment:
$88 - Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB SATA Drive
$140 - Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EADS 2TB SATA Drive

That's what sub.mesa meant by "EADS" drives: that's the hard drive line. I'm fairly sure 1TB and 2TB drives are decently-sized drives.
Click to expand...

You're right -- I did misunderstand. The way I read it, the EADS drives were good for home RAID on a software RAID controller, not the HighPoint :) Thanks for clearing that up.
 
A) I'd love to know where you guys are getting the benchmarks for these hdd performance statements.

B) have you considered an SSD? I suspect they're failure rate is going to be identical to that of RAM: very high but also unlikely to fail if working in the first place, certainly better than spinning disks anyways.

C) What is your backup policy? Have you considered throwing all your drives in a drobo and then just implementing a good/better backup policy? A raid wont save you from a flood/fire/powersurge/theft/angry-motherboard/angry-raid-controller/etc.

D) have you heard of spinright? It can proactively tell you if a drives about to fail if you keep track of the data that it gives you in the reports, also with it, granted you dont physically dent the disk, its the only program its author knows of that will recover bits inside a defective sector (considering it takes only a short string of bits for the entire 512byte sector to be written off as defective, thats handy).
 
MrWizard6600 said:
A) I'd love to know where you guys are getting the benchmarks for these hdd performance statements.
Click to expand...

I'm not terribly worried about the performance of the volumes I will use to store giant files. Granted, I don't want a bunch of old 212MB Maxtor IDE drives here ... but I'm not fussed about a WD Green being slower than a WD Black of the same capacity.

B) have you considered an SSD? I suspect they're failure rate is going to be identical to that of RAM: very high but also unlikely to fail if working in the first place, certainly better than spinning disks anyways.
Click to expand...

I've considered it for my boot volume, of course. At this point, though, I'm not looking to spend a minimum of $500 for a drive that's similar in capacity to my existing 250GB boot drive. I keep my OS, apps, games, etc. on my boot drive, and my data on other drives. Yes, I'd need to rethink that approach if I were to go SSD, but I figure I'd get better application performance if I stuck everything on a 640GB Black than if I stuck the OS on a SSD and everything else on a RAID of Greens.

C) What is your backup policy? Have you considered throwing all your drives in a drobo and then just implementing a good/better backup policy? A raid wont save you from a flood/fire/powersurge/theft/angry-motherboard/angry-raid-controller/etc.
Click to expand...

For my home machine ... I burn things to DVD if they're important enough to keep. Everything I haven't backed up can be re-downloaded, reinstalled from original media, or replaced. Yes, I've got a ton of friggin' DVDs on spindles :D

D) have you heard of spinright? It can proactively tell you if a drives about to fail if you keep track of the data that it gives you in the reports, also with it, granted you dont physically dent the disk, its the only program its author knows of that will recover bits inside a defective sector (considering it takes only a short string of bits for the entire 512byte sector to be written off as defective, thats handy).
Click to expand...

I have heard of Spinrite, yes, and for $90 it's definitely something I'll consider when I do end up buying new drives.
 
Been a while since I posted in here ... I had a look at the hardware compatibility list for my RocketRAID 2300 and saw that the 1TB Samsung F3 drives were on it, so I snagged four of them and a 64GB Kingston SSD. Ran surface scans on all four F3s and they were all good, so I set them up the way I wanted (after a firmware update on the 2300) and am in the process of moving everything over from the 320GB 7200.10s, 500GB 7200.9s, and 250GB 7200.8. Only have about 50GB to go :)

Thanks for the advice, all.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top