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]
