Hmm, best 1 or 1.5Tb drives for 12 drive RAID5 array???

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Hi folks. Pretty good at doing all the googling etc myself but there are too many pro/cons to pretty well all the drives that I have looked at for me to make a clear cut decision.

Basically my server has a 3ware 9500S-12 12 port Sata Raid controller which has 12 WD5000AAKS drives attached to it running as 1 RAID5 array with a hot spare online. This has been 100% faultless for almost 2 years now, since first assembling. Not a single fart, burp or hiccup in that time, brilliant drives.

Problem is that I have run out of space and have grown tired of cleaning/deleting stuff so I am going to swap out all 12 drives with either 1 or 1.5Tb drives and possibly upgrade the 3ware at the same time.

This is where my problem lies. As you can imagine, replacing 12 drives with 1/1.5 tb drives is going to be pretty pricy so I want to keep the costs down without sacrificing reliability, the AAKS drives have spoilt me in this respect.

I was looking at the WD Greens but they seem to park their heads all the time and can cary their speeds/all have different speeds slightly so sounds like a recipe for disaster in a large array like mine tbh. Caviar Blues seem to have their fair share of deaths so I am put off those too.

I was thinking about the Samsung F1/F2 drives, but want to make sure that they don't park their heads to save power and that they are reliable as hell. Been burnt in years gone by with Samsung HDD's ;)

Saving some power would be nice but not the end of the world and I can't afford to go buying the likes of the Caviar RE drives x 12 ;). Speed isn't key at all, reliability is paramount and no head parking/variable speed malarkey ;).

Cheers,

Nick.
 
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I'd advise going for 1.5TB drives over 1TB, same price/gb, and you get that extra 5TB of space, which will stave off the next upgrade a bit longer.
 
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I just ordered a WD Green after a lot of reading. The speed is fixed at 5400. WD Green or Black would be my choice as I have had 3 failures with Samsung and dont rate them.
 
Soldato
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With that many drives, I'd also recommencd going RAID6 if your controller supports it, or at least having a hot spare.

12 1.5TB disks would probably take a day or two to rebuild.
 
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Just buy some 1TB Blacks, They are the spirtual sucessor to the AAKS drives.

Price is a factor when buying 12 of them as well as an expensive new controller and I just don't need 7200rpm uberfast drives I think.

The problem with the Greens is the constant head powering down malarkey that they do and from reading it seems like you can only increase the timeout before they park, not disable it and that makes them a no go to me. Shame as they would have been my absolute first choice.

As for the Samsungs, I have that notion of them not doing too well in my head too but whatever I get seems like a gamble almost without spending a fortune. They are really cheap atm if you look around but this may well be for a good reason.

As for the RAID 6, no need as I run 11 of the 12 drives as RAID5 which allows one to fail and the controller keeps drive 12 ready as a hot spare to sync in straight away automatically :)

I think that I am going to getting 1Tb drives, not 1.5 as I want to get all 12 at the same time, but not eat in to my new car fund too badly! Lol sorry if I am making this complicated ;).
 
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Can you disable TLER on any consumer drives bar the WDs?
That might make your choice a lot simpler if you need to keep the costs down and avoid Enterprise level kit?
HTH
 
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From what I have read, it is advisable to have TLER enabled on drives when used in RAID. Do you mean the ability to enable it?

Thanks :).

Yes, that's what I said ;) (sorry, it was late last night and I had a headache! :))
You want to prevent the recovery time from a disk read or write error from taking too long, else the RAID controller can drop the drive for no reason.
In a 12 drive array...this wouldn't be a great solution.
Even then, I'd be wary of going RAID 5 on an array so big...I'd hate for another drive to fail while it rebuilds...can you go RAID 6?
 
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Get the F2's, I have a few and would buy a ton in confidence but I'm waiting for greater than 2TB before my RAID arrays get the bump.

Not sure if you can enable CCTL (Samsung's TLER equivalent) on their consumer drives...they didn't provide a utility the last time I checked a few months ago when I specced my last NAS :(
 
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Not sure if you can enable CCTL (Samsung's TLER equivalent) on their consumer drives...they didn't provide a utility the last time I checked a few months ago when I specced my last NAS :(

It's only the WD drives that have the problem of dropping out for some reason. I've built a few dozen arrays with F1's without issue, but with WD Greens I had some trouble without using the TLER tool.
 
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