On Dec 28, 2011, at 1:33 PM, objectwerks inc wrote: > I am not excusing Seagate for poor CS and QC. But when you buy bottom of the > barrel drives for a RAID you need to expect that they will fail. The "Green" > drives from any of the manufacturers suck (including WD "Green" drives). > Read the reviews on newegg and other retailers for them. While reviewers > tend to be more negative than average, the "Green" junk from any brand sucks > dockey-boobs based on these experiences by others from almost any retailer > customer review site. WD Black and Seagate enterprise level drives tend to > fair better in the reviews (though they have their share of failure reviews). > Why the drive companies even make these bottom of the barrel drives with > their names on them is a mystery to me. It just tarnishes the brand.
The "green" drives to my understanding spin a bit slower, and some vary rotational speed to further reduce power. They are also designed for use in systems that spin down the drives, yet most cheap RAID boxes leave drives spun up all the time, which may cause more wear and tear than the manufacturer expected. Long story short: cheapest drives, with the least expectation of durability in cheap boxes that tend to expose them to more run time and more heat is absolutely a recipe for disaster! They also don't perform great (by design). Too many people buy cheap enclosures, use cheap RAID cards, and cheap drives, and then run a RAID-5 array and are surprised when data loss or corruption occurs. I was unwilling for my media center to invest in proper RAID, so I found a big enclosure with plenty of fans and coolings, bought two, and twice as many drives as necessary, and mirror the content regularly. I don't use RAID, because the cheap (but well ventilated) box has a 2 TB limit, so I have a volume for movies, a volume for TV shows and a volume for music. The whole thing sits in a closet (but one with air vents for the A/C) and I don't care that it's noisy or messy. Best part: if I lose my music, it's on iCloud. If I lose my movies or TV shows... well, I didn't really need to keep all of that crap anyway, I can always redownload it or rerip it, etc, etc. _______________________________________________ MacOSX-admin mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin
