Afternoon all I want to expand my microserver's storage and would like some advice. I have previously installed one of these in the 5.25" bay and have hooked up the bays through a rocketraid card. (Click for link) One of the 2.5" bays has the OS drive in (a 64GB SSD) and the 4 3.5" bays are full. I will be populating the other 3 2.5" bays and setting up a RAID 5 array for some redundancy. I have narrowed it down to the following 3 options 3 x 1TB WD Red (WD10JFCX) - Approx £170 Pros 3 year warranty Specifically designed for NAS so low noise and power Cons Only 2TB of storage once in RAID 5 so effectively costs £85/TB. 3 x 2TB WD Green (WD20NPVX) - Approx £270 Pros Low power 2 year warranty (I believe) 4TB of storage once in RAID 5 - effectively £67.50/TB Cons Most Expensive option in absolute terms 3 x 2TB Samsung Spinpoint (ST2000LM003) - Approx £235 Pros Still relatively low power 4TB of storage once in RAID 5 - effectively £58.75/TB Cheaper option than the WD Greens Cons 1 year warranty I have checked that all the drives will fit in the Icy Dock enclosure (the Greens are 15mm thick for example). Thoughts? Cheers GK
Toshiba 2.5 Inch 2TB drives? (2 year warranty I think, £70 each or so from a few big retailers) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba-PX3006E-1HL0-Series-Internal-Drive/dp/B00IMQ41NG http://www.ebuyer.com/620247-2tb-toshiba-2-5-sata-hard-drive-px3006e-1hl0
You're supposed to be helping me choose, not giving me more options! Seriously though - thanks for that, I'll check them out. I'm not the biggest fan of Toshiba HDDs but I could be persuaded for the right price
If you're pushing that close to the edge of possible storage capacity/density with redundancy I would have thought warranty would trump any brand preference or even reliability concerns. After 2 years there will probably be a solution that makes more sense.
Fair point. I have come up with a slightly better long term option actually which is to replace two of the 3.5" drives with larger ones and replace the RAID controller to allow for the 3.5" drives to be put in RAID 5 - it would work out at about £210 including the replacement drives and controller - that would be for adding 4TB of storage on top of what I currently have and also I'd 'gain' the 2 x 2TB drives currently in my microserver which I could sell or utilise elsewhere...
I thought people were shying away from RAID 5? Something about the increased likelyhood of a second drive failure during an array rebuild, following an initial failure; thereby posing greater danger to the array.
Seems sensible. If you still want to utilise the 5.25 bay in a different way this seems pretty neat: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/icy-dock-mb971sp-b-duoswap-25-35-sata-hot-swap-drive-caddy
Very true - I would have backups but RAID 5 is inherently risky with large disks... Hmm... Thanks again for the suggestion - I have already got the one I linked to installed but I could do something like that instead.
This is often because people buy ALL the drives in the raid array at the same time from the same vendor... the most common fault with a drive is a bad sector, which commonly are found with the batch of drives. So when the parity is request there is a chance that one of the other drives will also have the fault and fail on parity read. Thus I tend to buy half the drives from vendor A and half from vendor B. I have found that production raid 5 with a decent controller (never ever use on board for R5) has served me well over the years. Of course I backup everything from that array to both a single larger drive, sync key files with Google Drive and backup server to Crash Plan. Just my experience.
