My RAID 5 server setup is starting to get long in the tooth, 8, 400 gig drives for 2.2TB of storage, and I'm looking to upgrade, most likely to 2 TB drives, Usually my default choice would just be 2tb Seagate drives, but with Seagate's inability to make good firmware lately (or so it seems) I'm looking at other manufacturers, but I see other stuff about how xyz drive may be good for a desktop but power management firmware etc makes it crap for RAID etc... I'm not looking to spend the $$$ for SAS or enterprise level stuff, regular consumer level drives are fine, I'm just looking for something that isnt going to fail quickly or suck performance wise because of some little caveat. WD blacks? Samsungs? Thanks!
WD Green drives here. Been fine so far. Admittedly one failed not long after buying them, but that was probably just bad luck. All the others have been fine since. Low power, and for a 5400 rpm drive, quite fast. Raw speed of each drive wasn't a major importance for storage, but even so, in a 3 disk RAID 5 can still turn in continuous read /write speeds of 210MB/sec. If raw speed is important, I'd go for blacks though.
im using 1TB seagate barracudas in my RAID1. no unusual performance problems or mechanical problems with the drives themselves. admittedly, these drives are about a year old so maybe there has been a change in firmware since then?
i'd agree with the call on the F4s or WD Blacks depending on your requirements... Well, for archiving, media serving, etc then i find the F4s are plenty fast enough, but i wouldn't be using them in a main PC for an OS drive or video editing or... ...so whilst eco drives will not be recommended for that ultimate speed, it's down to your actual usage (& budget) & only you know what that is. Otherwise, also remember that you're ltd to the data speed between the server & computer(s), so whilst you'd likely see a gain on small r/ws with WD Blacks d.t. access times, 'if' you're almost solely doing sequential file transfers then it'd make effectively no odds.
Running Samsung F4s in my own server, do the job really well and the array can easily saturate a gigabit link.
Running WD green drives in my nas. Got 2x 1tb raid 0 for the main data drive with a single 2tb drive as backup
The WD greens were the ones I was specifically talking a bout with not playing nice with RAID because of power saving, if I'm reading right, they spin down on their own without the PC commanding them to and the raid controllers get irritated when it doesnt respond as it tries to spin up, and calls it a failed drive. The Samsung F4's do look good in price and other reviews, I'll probably get them when it comes time to upgrade
Never had that happen with mine. My main RAID5 server is up 24/7 as is my RAID5 NAS.. both use WD EARS Green drives.
the wd greens are intentionally crippled in the states at least as wd has a seperate raid edition line they are trying to push. i'd go with some samsungs or hitachis. too bad you didn't buy last week f4's were on sale at newegg for $69
