Which drives to get for RAID?

[michelkenny]

I currently have 8 x WD 1TB Black with TLER enabled, and 6 x Hitachi 2TB (HDS722020ALA330) purchased a few years ago. At the time I bought them they were said to be the best for RAID.

I need to purchase some more drives. Now that you cannot enable TLER anymore on the WD drives, I was wondering what the recommendation is these days to prevent timeouts (I have an Areca ARC-1680 card).

I've done some searching in recent threads and it seems like Hitachi and Samsung drives are the ones to get these days. If this is correct, would any model work well or are only specific models recommended?

Thanks in advance.

 

[hotcrandel]

For SATA drives?

You couldn't go wrong with any of the following;

Hitachi Ultrastars
Western Digital RE
Seagate ES2

They are a bit more money but are all designed for hardware RAID controller usage. If you're the kind of guy who doesn't want any problems and is willing to spend a few more bucks to make your life easy, I'd say any of the above are good bets. I've used all three kinds of drives in production environments. The ultrastars have been flawless, the WD-RE green power drives had some issues with number of head parks, but after thats fixed they have been great. The seagates I've had to do many firmware updates but I believe most of their latest products have been ... stable enough.

Otherwise, I've been using Hitachi Desktar's on Areca hardware RAID cards with pretty good luck, and they are pretty much the cheapest drives you can buy.

I've also read Samsung has a F1-R or F1-RAID series drives that have disk usage patterns to other drives designed for RAID, but I have zero experience using them.

 

[Red Falcon]

Hitachi Ultrastars
Western Digital RE
Seagate ES2

+1

These are all considered enterprise drives of the nearline-class. They work very well in FakeRAID and hardware RAID setups. Seagate would be the best in this area, followed by WD, then Hitachi. But in truth, all of them are very good drives and are worth the premium to help protect your data and uptime.

 

[iconiK]

Hitachi Deskstar and Ultrastar are the same for the 5400 and 7200 RPM versions. Exact same drive, except Ultrastar has better warranty and possibly different fimware.

 

[Red Falcon]

Hitachi Deskstar and Ultrastar are the same for the 5400 and 7200 RPM versions. Exact same drive, except Ultrastar has better warranty and possibly different fimware.

No, they aren't the exact same drives.

The Ultrastar is a nearline-class drive with enterprise features. It is far more robust and has a much higher MTBF than the desktop-class Deskstar.

Just because two HDDs have the same RPMs and look similar does not mean they are the same, hardly.

 

[michelkenny]

Thanks for the replies. As much as I would love to stick with enterprise grade drives, I can't justify the 2.5x or 3x increase in cost. I'm having a hard time convincing the wife that we really need more drives in the first place!

Unfortunately I will have to stick with consumer grade drives. It sounds like Hitachi Deskstar's are still the ones to get, until WD destroys them...