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geekhack Marketplace => Great Finds => Topic started by: WhiteFireDragon on Thu, 18 April 2013, 04:19:44
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Hi guys, I'm about to pick up 2 of these drives for RAID1 now, and 1 more in the future for RAID5 when they get cheaper or when I need more space. I'm not using a dedicated NAS, just the onboard mobo controller, so do I really need TLER from this drive as opposed to just picking up some WD green drives? I know NAS and RAID5 will benefit form it, but not sure about mobo chip or RAID1. Im a total newb when it comes to arrays compared to other computer hardware.
Please let me know before the deal is over, thanks!
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=330896157100 (http://goo.gl/jCRPo)
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sup wfd,
the WD red drives are NOT ore reliable than the Green // Seagate barracudas
Yes it has better raid recovery for disk rebuild on raid 5, if you're doing raid 1, these drives don't give you anything...
And if you do intend to do raid 5, the motherboard controller likely won't be able to take advantage of the drive configurations.
Those controllers usually start at $250
You're best off doing raid 1 with 2x $90 3TB seagates.. Test them for a weak each with multiple full rewrites,
I've bought large batches of them, and 3/10 had unrecoverable sectors.. manufacturing defects in the plates
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There's a slight benefit to TLER only if you plan on keeping the system powered on 24/7, but not enough to really make a difference in modern drives so I wouldn't worry about.
As for raid 5 using your motherboard...you should definitely check around online for performance benchmarks for your model. Some are just pathetically slow. In most cases I think you would be better off just Ebaying a Dell PERC 6/i with BBU or even a HP P400 raid card. They're cheap and work well enough for mechanical drives.
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I agree with TP4Tissue on this one, make sure that the eBay seller take them back. My dad and I purchased 4 of the 1TB models and had 3 DOA upon arrival.
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Currently in my media server:
2x 3TB reds
2x 3TB greens
5x 2TB greens
Interesting fact: my oldest drive in the server (a WD20EADS) has racked up 3.2 years continuous power on hours and is showing no faults.
However, I have RMA'ed one 3TB green I think only a bit more than a year into its life, and I have another RMA on a 2TB green that has about 2.6 years on the counter (I think this latest one was from when the greens still had a 3 year warranty on them).
Even if you don't get any benefits in your raid1 - consider the extra 1 year warranty coverage may be worth the price increase of the red, which is probably the main thing WD is factoring into the price differential.
AND if you can be bothered returning it.
I'm sticking to reds at this point. I need to get another red now as need to replace my cold spare.
Also just as fyi I think I read somewhere that some brands of pre-built NAS boxes ignore the error recovery signal from the drives so should be able to achieve TLER even with greens ;) Take that dodgy manufacturers!
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TLER is useful if using a dedicated hardware RAID controller, less with a dedicated NAS which use a sw raid, but using a dedicated hardware RAID controller create a further point of failure on your system.
I'm sure you have listen this before: "raid is not backup", raid is for minimize downtime.
Having used sw raid, hw raid cards, external raid box, nas i say go green and plan a good backup/time machine/disaster recovery strategy.
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Do not use Green drives in an array!
They will fail, the array will crash, and when its not doing either of those two things it will simply be slow.
The built in power saving/sleep feature on Greens is the cause of this.
Reds were basically entirely made because of people using Greens in an array too often.
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I only ever use RE version drives, and even then, I have had those fail sadly enough. But overall, if you got the money, go with the enterprise class drives.
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My favorite large capacity drives are still the Samsung F3EG/F4 when they were still made by Samsung (I think they're made by Seagate now, which is why I'm hesitant to buy another Samsung drive)
Agreed about the WD greens, I've always gone with blacks for WD drives
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Unless you're a corporation with 1000000x drives like google..
relative to YOU.. $90 vs $200 drives in raid 5 is like gambling
0.00001 chance of lost data vs 0.00000001
WHICH IS NOT a significant difference.
The controller will make the difference here FAR MORE than the drive.
if you seriously care about the data, GET A GOOD CONTROLLER.
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It seems like there are a lot of mixed opinions about whether TLER is needed or not. I currently have a WD green drive, not in any array, and it's really annoying every time it wakes when I access it. It halts my system 2-4 seconds. At least the red drive won't go into sleep mode.
So what I was thinking was to pick up 2 red drives now for RAID1 onboard controller, then later on pick up another drive or two later on and put it in a dedicated NAS for RAID5. I think reds are better for this transition (onboard mobo to NAS), and also solve the annoying sleep mode? I'm not worried too much about the difference in data loss between reds and greens, but rather the higher chance of greens dropping from arrays because of the sleep mode.
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It seems like there are a lot of mixed opinions about whether TLER is needed or not.
No offense, but I'd post about this on [H] instead.
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I hardly go on there anymore. I might as well post this deal and ask the questions on the forum I currently most frequent.
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Yeah it's great that you posted this deal and there has been a lot of good input. I just meant that there are a lot more people that could provide specific raid array related info over there. Sorry :)
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It seems like there are a lot of mixed opinions about whether TLER is needed or not. I currently have a WD green drive, not in any array, and it's really annoying every time it wakes when I access it. It halts my system 2-4 seconds. At least the red drive won't go into sleep mode.
So what I was thinking was to pick up 2 red drives now for RAID1 onboard controller, then later on pick up another drive or two later on and put it in a dedicated NAS for RAID5. I think reds are better for this transition (onboard mobo to NAS), and also solve the annoying sleep mode? I'm not worried too much about the difference in data loss between reds and greens, but rather the higher chance of greens dropping from arrays because of the sleep mode.
I use 2x2TB RE4 drives and it also has those few seconds of locking up the system.
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It seems like there are a lot of mixed opinions about whether TLER is needed or not. I currently have a WD green drive, not in any array, and it's really annoying every time it wakes when I access it. It halts my system 2-4 seconds. At least the red drive won't go into sleep mode.
So what I was thinking was to pick up 2 red drives now for RAID1 onboard controller, then later on pick up another drive or two later on and put it in a dedicated NAS for RAID5. I think reds are better for this transition (onboard mobo to NAS), and also solve the annoying sleep mode? I'm not worried too much about the difference in data loss between reds and greens, but rather the higher chance of greens dropping from arrays because of the sleep mode.
I use 2x2TB RE4 drives and it also has those few seconds of locking up the system.
you can turn off power save in control panel, and it won't spin down.
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I wouldn't worry about TLER, unless you have a specific need for it, you probably don't need it. If it's having that much trouble with errors, it's time to replace the drive (or something) whether you have TLER or not. Unless you are running a mission critical server, a good backup is a better investment. Even if it is a mission critical system, a good backup is a better investment.
I agree with Tp4tissue about the reliability. I try and buy Seagate almost exclusively at this point. I use Hitachi on occasion, but I replace sooo many WD's on a day to day basis that I just can't stomach to buy them. Yes, I know many people have good luck with them, and some feel the same about Seagate. I used to buy from a guy who repaired drives, he had boxes of WD, and rarely any Seagate. There is only two WD drives I will buy and that is Blacks and Raptors, everything else I just shy (run) away from. Both are made of higher quality, and I have had Raptors hit by rain and survive (don't ask).
As others have mentioned, I would double check the warranty when buying through Ebay. Many companies will not accept a warranty on Ebay purchased items. This is likely true on drives as they are serial numbered and controlled.
As for the rest...
NAS boxes are extremely over-rated and over-priced. Build a mini-ITX server, you will do a lot better. All of these people complaining about drive speeds are fooling themselves if they own a NAS. Check your transfer rates people... Any cheap drive can saturate Wireless N and even a nice ATA will saturate gigabit, so why are you concerned with drive speeds on a NAS? My mini-ITX box can saturate Gigabit. I use my mini file server as if it was a local drive because it's fast enough. Try doing that with an old D-Link NAS. Also, if built right, it will be just as energy efficient. My file server with a single 2TB was using about 25 watts idle and about 35 during file transfers. Easily comparable to a NAS, and it's more capable as I can offload drive imaging, virus scans, torrents, large file transfers, web cam streams and more to it.
Years of Google testing has shown that spinning down a drive or leaving it running 24/7, has no effect on drive life. In fact Google found the only thing that really impacted drive lifespan (given good power and equal build quality) was vibration. Not even heat made a difference. Powering them down only saves about 5 watts, in the US that equates to about $5 if ran 24/7 over the course of an entire year. Needless to say, I quit babying my drives, except to make sure they were well powered, and bolted in well. I leave it running 24/7.
Instead of mirroring, invest in an online backup or something similar. Mirroring is not a backup, it's a fallback. If a drive fails, as a company you don't want to wait hours while a backup is restored. However, if a system is zapped by a bad power supply, lightening, etc... a mirrored drive is useless (seen it a few times), and worth even less than a usb external for backup. Unless it's a mission critical server, mirroring just adds complexity.
Personally, I have an agreement with a company 50 miles from me. I placed a 2TB low wattage mini-ITX system in their office and backup my stuff there. In exchange, I backup all of their files to my file server at the house on my 2TB file server. I use Crashplan's free software to handle the data transfer, it's fast, efficient and encrypts everything. Costs me nothing for offsite backup except the initial cost of building the server, of which, I only had to buy the drive.
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^this
I had a 4 bay Qnap but currently use 2 synchronized fileservers, 1 mini-ITX and 1 old pc, with 2 raid0 each (8+5 *2Tb manly static content), all green drives (less noise & heat), if the working one fails i just start the other and switch ip (sort of poor man HACMP).
Offsite backup is a good strategy.
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That's why I'm going to Windows 8 or 2012 on my file server rebuild, SMB Multichannel will give me ~200MB/s real world, and keep my ssd raid 0 in the desktop happily fed.
Also, leslieann, I assume you mean you just "map network drive" on your desktop? That's what I do, but it's annoying upon restart of my desktop it forgets credentials and says "not all network drives could be connected". I think it may also be an issue with my motherboard, the nic driver is slow to load, because I get an error from Steam right at boot that says no internet connection please retry.
Do you know if I can put a delay on the connection attempts to the network drives?
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That's why I'm going to Windows 8 or 2012 on my file server rebuild, SMB Multichannel will give me ~200MB/s real world, and keep my ssd raid 0 in the desktop happily fed.
Also, leslieann, I assume you mean you just "map network drive" on your desktop? That's what I do, but it's annoying upon restart of my desktop it forgets credentials and says "not all network drives could be connected". I think it may also be an issue with my motherboard, the nic driver is slow to load, because I get an error from Steam right at boot that says no internet connection please retry.
Do you know if I can put a delay on the connection attempts to the network drives?
Yes, I map the drive.
Keep in mind that multi SMB won't matter unless you are using fiber or multiple nics, Gigabit saturates around 120megs. This also means having a switch or router capable of this as well. Also, beware, some nics do not work well with Linux (a driver glitch), this is why some NAS boxes only push 30megs. I have a P4 and a Duron that can push 100+megs, but an Athlon X2 could only push 45 peak.
The "unable to connect" is normal, you shouldn't have to re-enter the password though. There is two reasons for this. The first is a glitch that happens on Windows Vista and 7 any time you change the nic driver. Disconnect and re-map your drive. You will still get the notice in the corner about being unable to connect, but it will connect...
Unless your login uses the same name, but a different password from your share, in this case you will almost always need to re-enter the password. The easiest fix for this is to alter the login for your share. In other words if both logins are "me" and one uses a password of "you" and the other uses a password of "you2", the system will always need the password for the share because it can't handle two passwords for the same login. Unless you you use a script, a login batch script loaded at startup can handle this. Search "net use drive map script" and that should get you going.
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My favorite large capacity drives are still the Samsung F3EG/F4 when they were still made by Samsung (I think they're made by Seagate now, which is why I'm hesitant to buy another Samsung drive)
Agreed about the WD greens, I've always gone with blacks for WD drives
Yes the samsungs are great, I have both an f3 and and f4 and I love them, and you're right, don't buy one now thinking the same models means samsung made them. I don't have any seagate-made samsungs but the reviews on those drives instantly dropped off after seagate moved in.
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there is a clear article on TLER on small system builder
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-features/31202-should-you-use-tler-drives-in-your-raid-nas (http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-features/31202-should-you-use-tler-drives-in-your-raid-nas)
FWIW, I've used spinpoints HD501LJ on our Thecus and they have been excellent.
Last week we installed 5 * 3TB RED NASDRIVES into a new Thecus N5550, and while the WD reds are slower than the new spinpoints I'm hoping they will serve well. 4 as RAID 10, and 1 as JBOD
The reds seem to be the new go-to drives for multiple vendors and are economical however 5400 RPM instead of 7200 and no vibration dampening. Personally I wouldn't use the WD greens in anything other than bulk storage for video recordings and i dont use WD blacks now that they've changed the error recovery behaviour.
Caveat, I'm not even a talented amateur when it comes to H/D technology, just some limited r/l experience