Er, sorry, HDAs, not HBAs :O Best,
Sean On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 6:55 PM, Sean Caron <sca...@umich.edu> wrote: > The WDC REs are not bad drives at all but IMO Hitachi Ultrastar is the > best line going right now. I have been working with them for some time from > 0.5T through 3T under very high duty cycle and they are fairly bulletproof. > The REs will do the work, but I have seen higher failure rates on them > right out of the box and higher failure rates on them in the longer term > (~3 years) versus the Hitachi. I am hesitant to trust Seagate for large > scale enterprise use though I think they are fine to use at home, in > lighter duty cycle applications or in USB enclosures, etc. > > The distinction you point out is very important particularly when > selecting drives to use in constructing a RAID; it's critical to avoid > those drives that attempt to spin down or sleep when idle; this confuses > the heck out of RAID and will cause the admin (we, the builder) no end of > misery... usually it's easy to identify these drives because they are > marketed as "Green" or "energy saver" but for some of the midrange product > lines ... "prosumer" ... sometimes you have to dig a little to get to the > facts. I think these Green drives are the worst thing on the market since > the old Quantum Bigfoot; I wouldn't recommend them to anyone. > > I suggest starting with the keyword "enterprise SATA" and going from there > ... these drives are certified for array use 24/7 and ship without any > "power saving" nonsense straight from the OEM ... the premium over a normal > consumer SATA disk is not really too awful. These generally use identical > or very closely related HBAs to the premium SAS disks but just with > different SATA-only formatter board. No real need to go SAS unless you > require multipath. > > Best, > > Sean > > > On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 4:56 PM, Alexander Schreiber <a...@thangorodrim.ch> > wrote: > >> On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 11:33:59PM -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote: >> > On 09/24/2015 04:30 PM, Alexander Schreiber wrote: >> > >> > >IMHO, you want to buy at one generation below the current max >> > >capacity on the assumption that they ironed out the bugs on that >> > >one. >> > >> > So, if you were to move up from the 500GB SATA drives to the "next >> > generation", which would you choose? >> >> My last set of drives where WD Red 2TB drives. They are designed for NAS, >> so can deal with 24/7 operation. One word of warning on those: by default >> they spin down on idle (and spin up again on access). In a typical light >> loaded environment, that is likely to run up the load cycles sky high >> in a hurry. So I recommended completely disabling that (note: after >> changing this setting, the drives need a power cycle). >> >> Older ones: I'm quite fond of WD RE series drives, a bit more expensive >> but from my experience very reliable. >> >> Kind regards, >> Alex. >> -- >> "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls >> and >> looks like work." -- Thomas A. >> Edison >> > >
