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So my Seagate 1.5TB disks arrived....

costabunny

costabunny

macrumors 68020
Original poster
May 15, 2008
2,468
86
Weymouth, UK
Its taken like forever and a day for this order, but I came home last night to find my 5 Seagate 1.5TB SATAs and 4 Seagate Cheetah SAS disks had finally made their way to Gibraltar.

Will be putting the SAS units in the Mac Pro over the next few days (when I can find a spare HDD to clone the current boot drive) - cannot believe I have 18 spindles in my room and none spare for a format and clone ! wtf lol

Anyways I put the 1.5TB disks in the Synology DS508 and set it off to build the RAID5 volume - took about 6.5hrs but thats the price of a large array with consistency checks. Now I have the other NAS mounted on it and is copying the files accross (was getting scary at 99% full). I estimate the copy will take best part of a 40hour run :eek: formatted It gives 5.5TB space :)

after thats done and Ive run the new NAS side by side wth the old one for a few weeks Ill sell the CS407e with its 4x1TB Hitachi's. (I guess if I dont find a sensible buyer Ill have a spare NAS lol)

No other point to this thread I guess but to share the synology NAS experience - In my experience (about 2+ years with their higher end RAID5 units) I'd am proud to reccomend them for reliability and features.

So thats my next two days (and theyre my holiday days)....
 
You can keep the NAS crap. Send me the Cheetah 15K.6's! :D :p

BTW, did you go for the 450GB's?
 
Good luck with the RAID5. I for one won't be touching RAID5 ever again. I had a 3x 1TB RAID5 setup, and the system shut down funny one time, the RAID lost sync, and there went thousands of gigabytes of data. I did manage to use a RAID Recovery software tool, but it was NOT fun. Now I just run RAID1 setups in independent enclosures. Less worry, no need for a new controller card if it dies (can just plug a single drive into ANY computer to access data), and just so much less hassle this way.

But each to their own. Nice drives, though!
 
WilliamG said:
Good luck with the RAID5. I for one won't be touching RAID5 ever again. I had a 3x 1TB RAID5 setup, and the system shut down funny one time, the RAID lost sync, and there went thousands of gigabytes of data. I did manage to use a RAID Recovery software tool, but it was NOT fun. Now I just run RAID1 setups in independent enclosures. Less worry, no need for a new controller card if it dies (can just plug a single drive into ANY computer to access data), and just so much less hassle this way.

But each to their own. Nice drives, though!
Click to expand...
Could you share with us what gear you were using at the time?

Thanks. :)
 
In all my years of Raid 5 arrays (back to the megaraid cards which dates me)... I've only had one horrible experience and I shall share simply because the odds are just... beyond belief.

So... main file server at work has a drive die... alarm on the DPT controller, no biggie. Unfortunately not hot swap (this is years ago) so requires a power down to swap the drive for the ready spare on the shelf. Power down the system, put the new drive in setting the ID properly etc... and power the server back up... won't boot. Long story short, during the power down/power up, a 2nd drive failed! Unfortunately, the failure on the second drive was catastrophic (slipped platter...) so we had to use a recovery service to recover the drives in a lab setup, etc... to the tune of $13,000 bucks. Needless to say, the owners of the company changed their attitude towards investing in a backup system. ;)

I run a ReadyNAS NV with 4 1tb ES-2's at home and have been really happy with the setup. I paid $150 shipped for each drive. I can remember paying $200 for a 40MB hard drive... amazing. :D
 
RAID5 second disk fail is a worry actually and this article is pretty scary http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162 - The math seems to make sense.. :(

The think I like about using the Syno boxes is that if the array were to suffer a nasty surprise (or even the box dies), the array is a pretty standard ext2 affair and the remaining spindles can be dumped into a linux box and possibly recovered.

still I keep mostly media stuff on it and backup work via rsync to my server in Germany.

I might even keep the old NAS (clean out the masses of TV Shows) and tell the new NAS to rsync to it periodically for extra safety.
 
costabunny said:
RAID5 second disk fail is a worry actually and this article is pretty scary http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162 - The math seems to make sense.. :(

The think I like about using the Syno boxes is that if the array were to suffer a nasty surprise (or even the box dies), the array is a pretty standard ext2 affair and the remaining spindles can be dumped into a linux box and possibly recovered.

still I keep mostly media stuff on it and backup work via rsync to my server in Germany.

I might even keep the old NAS (clean out the masses of TV Shows) and tell the new NAS to rsync to it periodically for extra safety.
Click to expand...
Nice find on the article. Backup strategy too. :)

Definitely proves the need for proper backups. :eek: :p

But I can't help but think enterprise drives, SAS, or particularly a planned replacement strategy before failure would help reduce the possibility of such an eventuality. ;)

Current economy won't help things much I'm afraid. I keep hearing this little voice the back of my mind "No. We can't afford it. Not in the budget...." :p
 
Put all of your stuff on a Dro-booooo.....

Yeah, that's the extent of my knowledge.

So what's all this amazing speed and redundancy for? You keeping secret government movies or something?
 
well I am working on this old movie for a friend in the oval office. kennedy I think he calls it....

seriously - I do a LOT of photography and am turning to video (Plus all my TV SHows are in digital format - would hate to lose them... ;) )
 
costabunny said:
well I am working on this old movie for a friend in the oval office. kennedy I think he calls it....

seriously - I do a LOT of photography and am turning to video (Plus all my TV SHows are in digital format - would hate to lose them... ;) )
Click to expand...

Fair enough - hope it all goes well.
 
ran into the write-cache issue with these seagates ... BLAM!

but am perservering and think I have a solution (actually the Mac owners who noticed these disks are crap on journalled fs, but ok on non-journalled gave me the clue).

Array is in progress of its fifth rebuild now after extensive testing (and general buggering about), and is parity checking at the mo....

looking good so far. (but with the issues and seagates non-authoratitive reply I am keeping the other NAS online for a while and rsyncing em)
 
costabunny said:
ran into the write-cache issue with these seagates ... BLAM!

but am perservering and think I have a solution (actually the Mac owners who noticed these disks are crap on journalled fs, but ok on non-journalled gave me the clue).

Array is in progress of its fifth rebuild now after extensive testing (and general buggering about), and is parity checking at the mo....

looking good so far. (but with the issues and seagates non-authoratitive reply I am keeping the other NAS online for a while and rsyncing em)
Click to expand...

Glad things are progressing on this. The whole write cache issue is what caused Netgear to drop them from their hardware compatibility list for the ReadyNAS units for the time being. I'm sure this is something that Seagate is addressing since it affects more than just NAS users. Nice that you found a workaround though!
 
Just a little update:

Seagate have admitted there is a problem and will be issuing a firmware update sometime in the next few weeks.

I am using two of these drives in the mac right now with no problems whatsoever (single volumes). (The NAS is being treated to another Hitachi 1TB and has had its array moved into the new DS508).

Think Ill buy a little C2D 1.6 machine and run Debian on it for the 1.5TB drives when they are ready, which has tha added advantage of being able to set them up manually how I want and also to add more spindles as required in the future.
 
costabunny said:
Just a little update:

Seagate have admitted there is a problem and will be issuing a firmware update sometime in the next few weeks.

I am using two of these drives in the mac right now with no problems whatsoever (single volumes). (The NAS is being treated to another Hitachi 1TB and has had its array moved into the new DS508).

Think Ill buy a little C2D 1.6 machine and run Debian on it for the 1.5TB drives when they are ready, which has tha added advantage of being able to set them up manually how I want and also to add more spindles as required in the future.
Click to expand...
Thanks. :)

A lot of people will be glad to hear a fix is on the way. ;)
 
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