It IS a home server. I DID check.. see my edit to my above post. As I said. I can disable TLER monitoring on the LSI and the Thecus pays no attention to TLER and ECC signals and handles drive timeouts in a more "Home" friendly manner. The fact is though.... you're missing my point. out of 6 drives, 2 of them failed within 3 months of purchase. My other advice was just that... advice... that desktop drives can drop off a RAID. I've never once disagreed with you, or suggested that you were wrong. I knew there was a possibility of TLER issues with desktop drives when I bought them. It's happened a few times... I just click rebuild. Not an issue for me, as I have two servers... one mirroring the other, and both are RAID 5 (one is actually RAID6 now). So data loss is not a concern due to this. Out of all the times they've dropped off the RAID though, the EARS "sleeping" was not the cause. However.. 2 mechanical failures out of 6 drives within 3 months seems excessive to me, and enough to make me consider whether I buy another WD drive.
It's not WD, it's more like EARS and EARX are more likely to have errors than the remaining WD drives. As i stated above, none of my WD10EADS or any older drives has failed yet. Unfortunately for OP, he has a issue now. If he wants a 5400-5900 RPM drive 1.5-2TB choice, then WD has only EARS and EARX. Seagate/Samsung will have their remaining 5400/5900RPM portfolio until the new Barracuda lineup and final merge of Samsung portfolio in the Seagate portfolio. It will take Toshiba some time to start their 3.5" lineup after getting the necessary patents, licences and factories from WDC/Hitachi. So for now, i would suggest him to either buy a WD Green (EARS/EARX) drive and hope in no failures or get a much more noisy Seagate ST2000DL003.
Re-allocated sector count of all my drives. Combined results. Seagate (2 drives) = 231 Samsung (2 drives) = 0 WD (7 drives) = 0 Every Seagate drive I've ever had has amassed large numbers of re-allocated sectors. I've even had re-allocated sectors on brand new Seagate drives. I know a drive with re-allocated sectors can quite happily go on to give long service... but they are after all... un-readable sectors that needed to be reallocated. I'd still chose WD over Seagate despite everything I've said above. You should be backed up anyway. Drive failure is just the nature of hard drives. Sooner, or later, they will fail. If you have a robust back up strategy it shouldn't really be an issue anyway.
Just to clarify, i sent every of those WD20EAxx drives except one to RMA when they got "Current Pending Sectors" to non-zero value and i had read errors at the same drive. Except the one none had reallocated sectors yet. RMA gone through without any problems in every case.
After reading reviews most of the weekend and almost getting blind from steering on the screen all day I have decided that Seagate and Samsung do make good drives... That is after all what my conclusion have been - so tomorrow I am pretty much convinced that I will buy a Samsung Spinpoint F4EG HD204UI 2 TB and a Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB ST320005N4D1AS (the drive they use in their own BlackAmour NAS 400-series). I would love to have a Hitachi 5K3000, but it is much more pricey at the moment and really really hard to find in stock anywhere - so that will maybe be a later expansion. What do you guys think about that?
Please note I haven't read all the thread as its too long Make sure you get different batches if you plan on getting the same drive, this will reduce the chance of them all breaking in one go. (If the manufacturer makes a bad batch by accident, you would be safer)
You might want to watch out for the 64K sectors on some of those drives if you're using some kind of linux. It will require a bit of a commandline workout to get things aligned. That issues may or may not exist now, but it did give me some grief around 6 months back.
I understand you talk about block size, but it leads to two questions - what should I look out for and what is the problem? Eventually if the problem is something like linux have a hard time reading from 64k blocks, then I should just make it another block size, say 32 or 128k, right? My intension is to use them in an unRAID server wich is a form of Linux for NAS servers
deadsea is talking about 4k physical sectors versus RAID block alignment. Considering pretty much all modern Linux distro installers automatically align their partitions to 4k boundaries, i don't see why should you have problems.
I run two NAS's at home and out of 6 drives I had a WD10EADS fail and got a replacement from Western Digital. The whole RMA process was simple and hassle free. I've tried to avoid the green drives for the NAS's but I'm also running 4 X My book studios and I believe they use the green drives (http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=210). I have slammed them with HD video for many, many hours and they haven't missed a beat. I also think the new WD sharespace NAS I just bought (running for a few hundred hours) might also be running the greendrives.
I have today ordered a 2TB drive what I believe is a WD20EADS from the only retailer I can find who is still selling those. I can find many who think that drive was really really good - and also seriously low noise (wich in my case is just as important). I have not made up my mind yet if I will use it for parity or data (because unRAID use a special kind of RAID4), but Im guessing it will be best to use it for parity (as it's the only EADS I will have) and then have the same type of drives for data (like a pair of Hitachi 5K3000). If I could just find Hitachi in stock for a good price...
I don't want to destroy your hopes, but in my opinion you will get WD20EARX. WD20EADS is not made by WDC probably for over a year now, WD20EARS is phased out for some time now too... So chances someone of really having WD20EADS in stock are super slim.
I know, that's also why I am looking forward to receive my package The store I ordered it from specializes in selling discontinued stock or stock bought from troubled shops - basically they sell what others can't. I have done some really good deals with them before on various occasions, their service is very sketchy (they have not responded on a email I send them early friday about what drive this is) but their prices and the products are usually top of the line. If it ends up being a drive I dont want I can always just send it back for a refund... I think it is indeed EADS as they seem to have more than 50 in stock, looks like someone cut them a really nice deal and they bought the whole lot.
FINALLY!!! I found an extremely good deal on a supposedly brand new drive on eBay.co.uk. -if not brand new the seller allows returns/refund so no worries. Here in Denmark the 5K3000 HDS5C3020ALA632 normally cost around £120, but there are no Danish retailers who have it in stock until end of May... I have been looking around in Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and UK to see if I could find a better deal at someones shop were they are in stock - only luck I have had is Germany were they go for around £145 (because of the more expensive postage from Germany to Denmark). I was on the verge to buy it in Germany until I had one last look at eBay.co.uk were I found a guy who have a 100% perfect seller score in 1.610 sales! ...and the best part is he sells this drive for nothing more than $102 including postage to Denmark! I know it goes for £80 in the US (@Newegg), but until it reaches Danish shores that would have become £115 including Danish taxes without even adding the postage fee yet (Newegg don't ship other than in US and I don't see a point in looking up other prices) So for now I have the drives I need, will add later if I find good deals Thanks for the help people
