I grappled with this problem several months ago when I was rebuilding my media server. I ended up going with consumer-class drives but using FlexRAID instead of a normal RAID.
The main advantage is that the parity info is kept on a separate drive (or drives if you want to be multiple redundant) from the data drives. That way, you can yank a data drive and pop it in another machine and it's still readable accessible. And because with FlexRAID you can have n number of parity drives as well an n number of data drives, having more than one drive fail at once is a lot less of a problem. So you can live with cheaper consumer grade drives. The real question you should be asking is whether you need backup or availability. If you just want to be able to recover from one or more drive failures and can deal with a bit of downtime, I think FlexRAID makes more sense than traditional RAID. ------------ Brian Sent from my iPhone On Jul 4, 2012, at 9:41, "Greg Sevart" <[email protected]> wrote: > If you're going behind a real RAID controller, of which the Areca 1223 > qualifies, you will either need to buy Hitachi drives (becoming harder to > find now that WD has swallowed them), or enterprise/RAID edition units from > other manufacturers. As has been brought up on other responses, consumer > class drives do not implement TLER (WD-specific) or more generically ERC > (Error Recovery Control). Some may say the risk is small - but it WILL > happen eventually, and it will happen at the worst possible time and could > very well result in total data loss. Green drives are especially notorious, > as they have a tendency to spin down regardless of OS-level power management > options, and will appear to hang when you access them. There are some > RAID-friendly "green" drives - the HGST 5Kxxxx series have worked well for > me, and WD has a specific RE4-GP line - but avoid all others, especially > WD's regular green drives, or the Samsung EcoGreens. > > I don't have a favorite HD manufacturer at the moment. I used to like WD, > but then they went out of their way to cripple their desktop-class drives > for RAID. Hitachi has been superb on this front, but now they are a part of > WD. Seagates haven't had a great reliability picture for a while and are > less predictable in RAID, and Samsung has been mostly absorbed into them > now. Some HGST manufacturing and design capability was divested to Toshiba > as part of the approval conditions from various regulatory entities, so we > could see new Toshiba 3.5" offerings at some point. > > Short version: If you can find Hitachi 7K3000 units, use those. The 5K3000's > would be fine too, but are almost impossible to find anymore. Failing that, > use enterprise class drives or you're putting your data at risk. Or, don't > use a RAID controller. > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] > [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of James Maki > Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2012 2:36 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [H] Hard Drive Warranties, Reliability and suggestions > > I have been out of the hard drive market since the flooding created insane > prices last year. It seems we are down to basically 2 choices, Seagate and > WD. For mass storage, I had been going with the Samsung 2TB "EcoGreen" > model, with great success. They have now been purchased by Seagate and have > only a 1 year warranty, a bit of a disappointment. I also have a number of 1 > TB WD Black Caviar units that have given great service. The 2TB model is > almost 2x the price of the Samsung/Seagate and WD Green models. Lastly, I > have several Hitachi 1TB 7200 RPM units that have not given me any issues. > > I am looking at building a new system for media storage and am trying to > determine the best approach. I am thinking on building on a hardware RAID > card to reduce the number of "partitions" (right now I have 21 "drives", > "partitions" and "DVDs," ranging from C: to W:, almost exhausting the > alphabet of available designations) and provide "automatic" backup. I have > read that many drives don't like hardware RAID cards unless you go with to > the ultra-expensive Enterprise drives. This system would not be designed for > speed (the 5400 RPM Samsungs streams movies without a problem), but safety > and reliability. > > I was looking at the Areca ARC-1223-8I PCI-Express 2.0 x8 Low Profile SATA / > SAS 8-Port PCIe 2.0 Internal SAS/SATA RAID Controller and eventually 8 > drives. Suggestions, comments or warnings? You input is much appreciated. > > Jim Maki > [email protected] > > >
