SPCR

I plan on buying a pair of 1 TB drives and placing them in software RAID (level 1) in Linux. Please note that I am only considering 1 TB drives, not 500 GB or 1.5 TB.

These will be used for data and media storage only (no OS or programs) so performance isn't a big issue. I am mostly concerned with reliability, with low noise being secondary in importance.

I am not considering Seagate due to the firmware issues and Samsung drives aren't available in 1 TB in my area.

I was originally going to go with Western Digital Caviar Green but I am afraid of the head park issue. However, it's been a couple of years since the first Green drive appeared and I have yet to see a report of an actual disk failure attributed to this. So do you feel this is a safe option?

My other options are Western Digital Caviar Black and Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B. Have there been any major problems reported for either of these drives?

Can someone give me a recommendation on which of these three drives I should choose?

Also, I seem to recall reading somewhere that it is recommended that both drives should be from the same company and model. Is that true or should I get two different ones, such as one Western Digital and one Hitachi?

The WD has released a firmware update that allows you to set the parking interval, or (IIRC) to turn it off completely, hence I think it's safe to consider these drives.

If you're looking for reliability, drive packaging matters more than some vendors realize. Rough handling may cause failures well beyond the retailer's return period. Newegg is notorious for not packing drives properly. I've had good luck with Mwave, though, and I believe last time I was buying a drive I verified that Zipzoomfly knows how to pack them too, though I didn't actually order from them.

To avoid hassles with RAID arrays, you ideally want not only the same model, but the same version. You'll almost always get identical drives if you order them at the same time, but it won't hurt to tell the vendor they're for raid and you want matching drives.

If you're looking for silence and performance isn't important, you might like the high capacity drives intended for HTPC's. Unfortunately, I have no experience with the current crop of drives, so I can't offer you any direct advice on them.

ctag wrote:I am not considering Seagate due to the firmware issues and Samsung drives aren't available in 1 TB in my area.

There were some big problems with the Seagate 7200.11 1 TB drives at one stage, the same cannot be said with the 7200.12s. I have the 7200.12 1 TB and to date no problems. The early models of this drive were geared to performance and suffered from obtrusive seek noise. Seagate reduced the noise at the cost of performance in later models. There don't seem to be any other issues, but that's the problem with hard drives, isn't it? Make [insert name] is totally reliable, and highly recommended until someone has a problem, and then it doesn't look like a good buy anymore.

The 'DeathStars' are a case in point. This nickname was acquired by the DeskStars through significant failures of an earlier model unrelated to the current product. The underlying cause was that the drives needed active cooling, which in most cases could be easily cured by fitted an intake fan. So the presence or absence of an intake fan can be a factor in hard drive reliability.

If I had not bought Seagate (or Samsung), my local hardware dealer could offer me the Maxtor DiamondMax 22, the Western Digital Caviar Green, the Western Digital Caviar Black, and the Western Digital Green Power. The Maxtor apparently is not a particularly good seller, and of the WDs the Green Power 1 TB stands out as a 5400 rpm drive which claims improved reliability.

I have good experience with WD caviar black 1TB and Samsung F1 1TB.

I have had to replace 2*500GB Segates and have decided not to buy any more of them for at least 2 years (as a private penalty )

ctag wrote:Also, I seem to recall reading somewhere that it is recommended that both drives should be from the same company and model. Is that true or should I get two different ones, such as one Western Digital and one Hitachi?

It's not true. Best get totally different drives... hopefully they won't fail at the same time that way.

I'd say get identical drives for raid setups, but buy theom from different places so you dont get consecutive serial numbers, aka. different batches.

And the rationale for getting identical drives in this case is?

Different RAID setups have different requirenments.

For RAID 1, writes will be limited by the slowest drive. While two similar drives may perform about the same overall, you'll get the performance of the slowest drive in every situation. In some configurations, differences in read performance could be a problem too. Hence, the ideal is to use identical drives.

I think the odds of two drives in RAID 1 failing at the exact same time due to manufacturing defects are rather long, but I suppose it could happen.

Lodestar, which version of the 7200.12 do you have and what are the acoustics like?

ctag wrote:performance isn't a big issue. I am mostly concerned with reliability

So I doubt that performance as slow as the slower of the drives (for some operations) is going to be an issue, unless they are badly matched. I've temporarily put badly matched drives in a RAID1 array on occasion and I don't recall performance being surprisingly poor.

Even though the odds of drives failing at "exactly" the same time is indeed very low, relying on identical drives subjected to similar usage and conditions can still be a cause for concern. In particular, if one doesn't have spares and/or if one will not be the only user of the array, the time between drive failure and rebuild could be far from negligible.

True. You don't want to keep running for weeks on one drive if the other fails. Personally, I would be inclined to shut down the computer if I could possibly get by until the new drive arrived, and if I did have to keep going, I'd back up anything critical. Even if the drives are not identical, there could be an environmental reason for the first failure.

But I don't think either the performance or risk issues are very significant in this case. This is SPCR, hence noise trumps all. I'd just get two of whichever drive is easiest on the ears.