Hi,
I am one of the WD EARS "victims" (see here to find out what I am talking about: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=15402) and thinking about buying new drives for my home server.
A few recommendations for drives are given in the thread linked above. However I thought I create a new thread on this matter.
My homeserver holds my backups, and some media files. Performance is not the most important issue (as long as it is not as bad as with the WD EARS drives). More important is reliability, actually most important.
My server runs 24x7 which is another reason the WD Green drives are not suitable. They have a power management feature (which you cannot switch off) that puts the drive to sleep every few seconds, just to get woken up by the ZFS. Hence my drive already have 16,000 start/stop cycles (I think they call it load cycles).
Now I am thinking about whether to buy "enterprise" drives with a long warranty and which are made for 24x7 usage. Does anyone have some numbers or experience with the difference between consumer drives and enterprise drives?
I am using a RaidZ1 with 4 1GB WD EARS ATM.
Here are the contestants, I am looking for 1GB drives
Hitachi UltraStar A7K2000
+ 5y warranty
- not cheap
? I found no reports on how these perform on the long run
Western Digital RE4 or RE3
+ 5y warranty
+ alleged good performance
- I do not want to give WDC even more money
- quite expensive
- read somewhere the WDC support is quite bad
Samsung SpinPoint F1 RAID
+ 7y warranty
- quite old
? really made for 24x7 operations?
? what is the difference between RAID and non RAID versions?
Maybe others are interested in this matter as well. Any thoughts?
I am one of the WD EARS "victims" (see here to find out what I am talking about: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=15402) and thinking about buying new drives for my home server.
A few recommendations for drives are given in the thread linked above. However I thought I create a new thread on this matter.
My homeserver holds my backups, and some media files. Performance is not the most important issue (as long as it is not as bad as with the WD EARS drives). More important is reliability, actually most important.
My server runs 24x7 which is another reason the WD Green drives are not suitable. They have a power management feature (which you cannot switch off) that puts the drive to sleep every few seconds, just to get woken up by the ZFS. Hence my drive already have 16,000 start/stop cycles (I think they call it load cycles).
Now I am thinking about whether to buy "enterprise" drives with a long warranty and which are made for 24x7 usage. Does anyone have some numbers or experience with the difference between consumer drives and enterprise drives?
I am using a RaidZ1 with 4 1GB WD EARS ATM.
Here are the contestants, I am looking for 1GB drives
Hitachi UltraStar A7K2000
+ 5y warranty
- not cheap
? I found no reports on how these perform on the long run
Western Digital RE4 or RE3
+ 5y warranty
+ alleged good performance
- I do not want to give WDC even more money
- quite expensive
- read somewhere the WDC support is quite bad
Samsung SpinPoint F1 RAID
+ 7y warranty
- quite old
? really made for 24x7 operations?
? what is the difference between RAID and non RAID versions?
Maybe others are interested in this matter as well. Any thoughts?