Hi,
I'm looking for 2 drives of 1TB for a RAID system with FreeNAS. I'll be plugging them into an AOpen EZ65 cube which I'll try to underclock. Requirements are: reliability, low power, silent (in decreasing order of importance). I've looked at the Seagate 7200.12, but there's too many people experiencing DOA with that drive. So then I looked at the enterprise versions (WD RE3 or Seagate SE2), but they seem to use a lot of power.
Other people with a similar setup who want to share their experiences ?
Thanks,
Peter.
RAID hard disk
Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee
Hi,
I'm currently looking at the WD 1500 GP indeed, or the Samsung F2 EcoGreen 1500. Both are under €100, giving me a mirrored 1,5TB for less than the price of one WD RE4. I'm looking into OpenSolaris with ZFS to mirror things. When I want to add an extra drive, there's a trick to move from a 2 disk mirror to a 3 disk RAID-Z (RAID 5), which is good for future extension. I'm hoping ZFS is more forgiving for drives that don't aren't RAID versions. I'll also look at the TLER option for normal drives: this limits the repair time for bad blocks, which is a requirement for RAIDs. In the "raid edition" drives, this is by default on, that's one of the reasons why they are officially RAID compatible. But if this feature also exists on the non-raid-edition drives, enabling it will help.
I'll have to think of backups, though. I'm now looking at storing everything on my PC and backing up onto the NAS, but the 4 hard disks (150GB boot + 250-250-500GB data) of my PC are a bit too noisy. Another option is buy a third 1,5TB drive for my PC to decrease the noise. I'd keep the old data drives to set up a NAS backup server later.
Peter.
I'm currently looking at the WD 1500 GP indeed, or the Samsung F2 EcoGreen 1500. Both are under €100, giving me a mirrored 1,5TB for less than the price of one WD RE4. I'm looking into OpenSolaris with ZFS to mirror things. When I want to add an extra drive, there's a trick to move from a 2 disk mirror to a 3 disk RAID-Z (RAID 5), which is good for future extension. I'm hoping ZFS is more forgiving for drives that don't aren't RAID versions. I'll also look at the TLER option for normal drives: this limits the repair time for bad blocks, which is a requirement for RAIDs. In the "raid edition" drives, this is by default on, that's one of the reasons why they are officially RAID compatible. But if this feature also exists on the non-raid-edition drives, enabling it will help.
I'll have to think of backups, though. I'm now looking at storing everything on my PC and backing up onto the NAS, but the 4 hard disks (150GB boot + 250-250-500GB data) of my PC are a bit too noisy. Another option is buy a third 1,5TB drive for my PC to decrease the noise. I'd keep the old data drives to set up a NAS backup server later.
Peter.
Update: NAS ready
Hi,
Short update on how everything went. I ordered 3* Samsung EcoGreen F2 1,5TB. One is for in my main PC, replacing the noisy set of 250+250+500GB Seagates. That PC is a lot quieter now ! I boot from a Raptor 150GB which I should suspend, but the Samsung is near inaudible even unsuspended.
The other 2 Samsungs are now inside my little barebones. Unfortunately, one arrived DOA and the other one makes strange seek noises when starting up. At least, it works and I've been able to test out the NAS. I was planning to use OpenSolaris with ZFS, but this OS didn't recognise my drives. FreeNAS was up and running immediately, so I set it up and after some 5 minutes, I was copying files over the network. The NAS also has a Seagate 80GB boot drive which is quite noisy, so I'll be kicking that out and replacing it by an IDE CF or something similar. Noise will be very good after that. Power consumption is around 100W and unfortunately, the BIOS doesn't allow drastic underclocking. It'll be a NAS that I'll be switching on and off manually, then.
For a NAS that cost me about €160 (price of the 2 Samsungs), I guess it's not bad
Peter.
Short update on how everything went. I ordered 3* Samsung EcoGreen F2 1,5TB. One is for in my main PC, replacing the noisy set of 250+250+500GB Seagates. That PC is a lot quieter now ! I boot from a Raptor 150GB which I should suspend, but the Samsung is near inaudible even unsuspended.
The other 2 Samsungs are now inside my little barebones. Unfortunately, one arrived DOA and the other one makes strange seek noises when starting up. At least, it works and I've been able to test out the NAS. I was planning to use OpenSolaris with ZFS, but this OS didn't recognise my drives. FreeNAS was up and running immediately, so I set it up and after some 5 minutes, I was copying files over the network. The NAS also has a Seagate 80GB boot drive which is quite noisy, so I'll be kicking that out and replacing it by an IDE CF or something similar. Noise will be very good after that. Power consumption is around 100W and unfortunately, the BIOS doesn't allow drastic underclocking. It'll be a NAS that I'll be switching on and off manually, then.
For a NAS that cost me about €160 (price of the 2 Samsungs), I guess it's not bad
Peter.
If it's just during start-up, it's probably alright. Both of my F2 Ecogreen 1TB makes it too. Of course there some differences between 1000 and 1500GB models but I don't know if the differ in the aspect of making the long rattle on initialization. Making a few seeks upon spin-up is extremely common but on F2 EGs it's a surprisingly long rattle.Unfortunately, one arrived DOA and the other one makes strange seek noises when starting up.
WD GP compared to WD RE4 is not a valid comparison. You would need to compare WD RE-GP to WD RE4 (or compare WD GP to WD Caviar Blue). If you choose to use non-RE (whether is Caviar or GP) then you would risk drive dropping out of array due to lack of TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery). And if you used RE in a non-RAID (or in a RAID-0 which is no real RAID) you would have risked file corruption or other oddities coming from existence of TLER. WDs are quite bitchy as a single model is either for RAID or non-RAID and cannot be used in both environments.I'm currently looking at the WD 1500 GP indeed, or the Samsung F2 EcoGreen 1500. Both are under €100, giving me a mirrored 1,5TB for less than the price of one WD RE4.
F2 Ecogreen is safe in this aspect, for both, AFAIK. And Samsung doesn't charge you extra for RAID compatibility.
This is interesting. I was looking myself for 3 reasonably cheap and quiet 1.5TB drives for a RAID 5 array (managed by the Motherboard adapter, and run under Windows 2003), either the WD15EARS (Caviar Green) vs Samsung HD154UI (F2 EcoGreen).whiic wrote: WD GP compared to WD RE4 is not a valid comparison. You would need to compare WD RE-GP to WD RE4 (or compare WD GP to WD Caviar Blue). If you choose to use non-RE (whether is Caviar or GP) then you would risk drive dropping out of array due to lack of TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery). And if you used RE in a non-RAID (or in a RAID-0 which is no real RAID) you would have risked file corruption or other oddities coming from existence of TLER. WDs are quite bitchy as a single model is either for RAID or non-RAID and cannot be used in both environments.
F2 Ecogreen is safe in this aspect, for both, AFAIK. And Samsung doesn't charge you extra for RAID compatibility.
The 1.5TB size does seem to give the best bang per buck at the moment.
I am just about to buy the WD drives as they seemed to give slightly better performance with the 64MB cache, and subjectively seem to be quieter. I have also read somewhere that the Samsung F2 1.5TB drive don't make a good RAID platform - something to do with firmware???
I wonder how much of this is fact or fiction. Of course, we are all just going off of other peoples comments.
Well, just been browsing the WD site and came across this:
What is the difference between Desktop edition and RAID (Enterprise) edition hard drives?
To me this might not be hugely distracting as no Critical data will actually we stored in this array - it will just be media an a file store.
I will have a look on the Samsung site for anything similar.
EDIT - There appears to be absolutely no info in the Samsung site with regard to RAID, for ANY drive! I'm guessing that this is something that they don't support in the majority of thier drives but doesn't necessarily meant hat it won't work. Not sure if the error thing mentioned in the WD article above works in a similar way on these drives or not. Interestingly, they d0/did manufacturer a specific RAID model - the SpinPoint F1R - so at a guess I would say that the other models are similar to the WD normal drives.
What is the difference between Desktop edition and RAID (Enterprise) edition hard drives?
To me this might not be hugely distracting as no Critical data will actually we stored in this array - it will just be media an a file store.
I will have a look on the Samsung site for anything similar.
EDIT - There appears to be absolutely no info in the Samsung site with regard to RAID, for ANY drive! I'm guessing that this is something that they don't support in the majority of thier drives but doesn't necessarily meant hat it won't work. Not sure if the error thing mentioned in the WD article above works in a similar way on these drives or not. Interestingly, they d0/did manufacturer a specific RAID model - the SpinPoint F1R - so at a guess I would say that the other models are similar to the WD normal drives.