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Western Digital or Seagate?
- Thread starter strausd
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just talked to a friend "in the know".
software RAID 0 or 1 presents big big stability problems using those drives, however RAID5 seems to work for some reason. fwiw anyway...
Seriously, you can Google this pretty easily. I've no first hand experience because others scared me off (fortunately). I found RAID 0 to be a big enough pain with 2 high performance drives so I won't be going back.
If your time and data aren't important to you, try it out and let us know how things work out. Maybe it will be fine. I honestly don't see what you will save. I've purchased a LOT of 2TB drives in the $100-$150 range.
Lost data and more of a pain when it's time to upgrade or migrate data.
For instance, when it's time to replace the array. I'm sure they've probably made headway here, but when I was doing this it was more difficult to migrate.
You couldn't "ghost" the drive.. since the data was striped on 2 drives. Again, there are probably better tools now but I'm not motivated to find out. I always found the benchmarks on RAID0 were better than real-world usage.
FWIW, I routinely clone my Windows RAID 0 data "drive" to an external single drive.
Can SuperDuper do something similar for Mac HW?
cheers
JohnG
use RAID 0+1 then
Well I honestly would if I had my current mindset and resources.
But when I was doing this, it was all about performance on the cheap. Actually I could get away with RAID 0 fine today. I've got a 12TB server doing nightly backups of every computer in my home.
Ya, and Carbon Copy Cloner, and as long as its just a clone, so can disk utility.
And I think I may just save some money and get a 2TB Caviar Black and a 2TB Caviar Green. I will put windows 7 on the Caviar Black and then the rest of the drive and SSD will be fine with TM on the 2TB Green. Then when my movies and project files start to fill it up, I'll add a second Black and Green. How does that sound?
Go big or go home? Not this time... haha
wow. storage nazi! ive got about 6TB i think. am nearly out, but i HATE having everything stored in a mass of daisy chains (damn you iMacWell I honestly would if I had my current mindset and resources.
But when I was doing this, it was all about performance on the cheap. Actually I could get away with RAID 0 fine today. I've got a 12TB server doing nightly backups of every computer in my home.
).thinking of buying a Fractal case (10 bays at the end of the year) and turning that into a file server. do you use cases, or drobos?
wow. storage nazi! ive got about 6TB i think. am nearly out, but i HATE having everything stored in a mass of daisy chains (damn you iMac
thinking of buying a Fractal case (10 bays at the end of the year) and turning that into a file server. do you use cases, or drobos?
I use HP's EX495 MSS now, with a Sans Digital 5 bay via the e-sata port. I started with an EX480 that I got for a great price, and I fell in love with the thing. I won't go on and on here, but suffice it to say that HP did a wonderful job with this line. It's small, well built, and their software is a solid value-add over the stock WHS platform. It's superb in a Mac environment.
Obviously I never thought I'd surpass the need for 4 drive bays, but it was nice being able to plug in a 5 bay add-on for $120 once I blew past the MSS capacity.
thanks very much for the reply man, ill certainly look into those sets of storage devices - as my hard drives are getting ridiculous!
sorry for going OT OP.
i used WD640s for RAID0 with 4 drives and was very happy with them. I support the WD black suggestion i hear they are great/fast drives. My WDs were quiet and cool. Now i have 2 Hitachi 2TB drives in RAID0 for 4TB and they work well also though they are noisier than the WDs.
How long have you had the hitachis? I was thinking about those but the western digitals seem to be of better quality.
I've been using WD drives exclusively (well besides SSDs) for more than 5 years now and didn't have a single drive failure (till now ).
Having used almost every WD line in the past few years, I highly recommend the WD Green drives.
My storage server runs with 8 2TB WD20EADS drives for about half a year now. No problems whatsoever. The old server with 8 500GB RE3 drives also didn't have a drive failure (runs for 3 years now 24/7).
When I got my Mac Pro (09 model) I popped in 2 1TB WD Black drives which are fast, no question, but they are loud, the loudest part of the whole machine.
In a RAID0 they made about 200MB/s reading and writing.
After a few weeks the noise really pissed me off which is why I replaced them with 2 WD20EARS drives.
Although the Green drives spin a little slower, the array speed is the same (200MB/s) due to the higher density.
It was really worth it. The machine (octad '09) is almost inaudible, although it has 4 mechanical drives in total. A friend of mine has a MacBook with a 7200RPM drive and this machine is louder than my Mac Pro.
And no, putting Green drives in a RAID is no problem at all. Works just fine.
).Having used almost every WD line in the past few years, I highly recommend the WD Green drives.
My storage server runs with 8 2TB WD20EADS drives for about half a year now. No problems whatsoever. The old server with 8 500GB RE3 drives also didn't have a drive failure (runs for 3 years now 24/7).
When I got my Mac Pro (09 model) I popped in 2 1TB WD Black drives which are fast, no question, but they are loud, the loudest part of the whole machine.
In a RAID0 they made about 200MB/s reading and writing.
After a few weeks the noise really pissed me off which is why I replaced them with 2 WD20EARS drives.
Although the Green drives spin a little slower, the array speed is the same (200MB/s) due to the higher density.
It was really worth it. The machine (octad '09) is almost inaudible, although it has 4 mechanical drives in total. A friend of mine has a MacBook with a 7200RPM drive and this machine is louder than my Mac Pro.
And no, putting Green drives in a RAID is no problem at all. Works just fine.
I'm looking for a reasonably priced 2 or 4 bay enclosure to build a backup solution around, what do you recommend using with the WD green drives?
I liked the Synology boxes until they told me the WD green drives gave their boxes problems... and I prefer it to be gigabit ethernet to connect to my network...
Well you're looking for a NAS, right?
I haven't used any NAS systems yet, I preferably go for self made servers as network storage devices or DAS systems with eSATA, but before I decided to build another custom storage server, I read a lot of reviews about NAS systems and if I were on the market to buy such a thing right now, I'd definitely go for Thecus or QNAP. Both have devices with a reasonable price, nice features and great performance. Netgear also has great devices but they are very pricy.
The Thecus devices definitely support WD Green drives, many users have problems with the 1.5TB drives though.
From what I've read the 1.5TB drives are kind of difficult to use with RAID systems. 1TB and 2TB work fine.
I haven't used any NAS systems yet, I preferably go for self made servers as network storage devices or DAS systems with eSATA, but before I decided to build another custom storage server, I read a lot of reviews about NAS systems and if I were on the market to buy such a thing right now, I'd definitely go for Thecus or QNAP. Both have devices with a reasonable price, nice features and great performance. Netgear also has great devices but they are very pricy.
The Thecus devices definitely support WD Green drives, many users have problems with the 1.5TB drives though.
From what I've read the 1.5TB drives are kind of difficult to use with RAID systems. 1TB and 2TB work fine.
...not exactly sure what I want/need... I've been looking at Thecus, Qnap, Synology and the HP data vault 310 trying to decide...mainly it all started out as looking for a good, safe, secure back up solution that I could manage myself...
Looks like the 1.5TB Caviar Black just came back in stock at newegg. I will probably go for two of these in a Software RAID 0 now
I've had the Hitachis' about 6-9 months now and no trouble so far. i am a fan of WD also.
Looks like the 1.5TB Caviar Black just came back in stock at newegg. I will probably go for two of these in a Software RAID 0 now
let me know your experience with those.. i was seriously considering them (1TB version), but they were too expensive.
From my experience: STAY AWAY FROM SEAGATE !
- Barracuda till 7200.10 were OK
- Barracuda 7200.11 was crap - faulty firmware, dying drives etc.
- Barracuda 7200.12 people hoped they will be ok and guess what ?
- I got 3x dead 7200.12 1 TB drives in my server only this year !
- I got 2x 7200.12 500 GB drives with lots of bad sectors in my Mac Pro
You need to always upgrade firmware on them. The current one for 7200.12 is CC46.
I love Samsung drives - HD502HJ is the best 500 GB HDD drive. I got two of them in my Mac Pro since a year - no problems so far and speed is great. If you 1 TB drives grab a HD103SJ.
I was testing one WDC Green Series 1 TB and it was running slow 66 MB/s, so I do not recommend these drives.
- Barracuda till 7200.10 were OK
- Barracuda 7200.11 was crap - faulty firmware, dying drives etc.
- Barracuda 7200.12 people hoped they will be ok and guess what ?
- I got 3x dead 7200.12 1 TB drives in my server only this year !
- I got 2x 7200.12 500 GB drives with lots of bad sectors in my Mac Pro
You need to always upgrade firmware on them. The current one for 7200.12 is CC46.
I love Samsung drives - HD502HJ is the best 500 GB HDD drive. I got two of them in my Mac Pro since a year - no problems so far and speed is great. If you 1 TB drives grab a HD103SJ.
I was testing one WDC Green Series 1 TB and it was running slow 66 MB/s, so I do not recommend these drives.
66MB/s with a 1TB WD Green? That seems odd.
I'm getting 88MB/s read and 82MB/s write speed from each of my 500GB WD Greens, which are almost half filled by the way. Considering the higher density of the 3 platter 1TB drive you should get higher transfer rates.
The WD Black drives perform absolutely well (for mechanical drives), but unless you're going for the 2TB model, I think that the Black drives aren't the best choice.
You get similar performance with a 2TB Green drive which costs the same or less than smaller Black drives. And of course you get a drive that's almost inaudible. A feature you definitely can't assign to a Black drive.
I do plan on getting 2 Caviar Greens, but just as backup volumes so I will not need speed. Right now, I think I may not go with a RAID 0 config, considering it uses some CPU and if one drive fails, I don't want to go through the trouble of getting everything back to how it was. Where is with JBOD I wouldn't have near as big of a problem if a drive were to fail.