Recommend drives for RAID 5?

Hi all,

I'm looking at moving my storage from 2 external USB drives (backed up) onto an internal RAID 5 array using something like LSI's MegaRaid cards, probably 8-port.

I'm just wondering what drives are suitable for this. I see various companies do 24/7 class drives and I've also read that the WD Green drives aren't great in RAID.

I'm just wondering what people can recommend? I'd want 3TB available space to start with as I currently have 2TB and would like room to expand :)

Cheers in advance!
Paul.

The performance of my 1TB Samsung F1s are great in raid, had them almost a year without any failures or issues *touches wood*

http://www.clanhash.co.uk/files/ShaiRAID.png

Burst is low as that benchmark was done at a time when the controller was running at either 2x or 4 x PCI-E (instead of the 8x it's running at now)

If you can bear the noise, Hitachi 2TB

http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/2333/perc6.png

It is on a DELL PERC 6/i (aka MegaRAID) card. I only built this array for 3 days so can't say for reliability (RAID6 says it all).

Cheers folks, not too bothered about performance as it's for a filestore :)

The theory goes that enterprise drives designed for 24x7 operation are preferred. However a study by Google (who use thousands of drives) found that inexpensive standard drives lasted just as long, although (IIRC) the initial failure rate was a little higher. Since you are using RAID 5 then standard drives will probably be fine, especially if you have a back-up regime (Raid is not a backup substitute!)

Google search tyhe study, it makes interesting (though long) reading.

You could buy the drives at different times/different sources (but check the part numbers) to try to ensure you have drives from different manufacturing batches (against the remote offchance that you have a batch fault) but it probably isn't necessary.

AS for WD green drives being unsuitable, that isn't something I have seen reported, but if you are concerned, go for standard, or another reputable make (Samsung for example)

Cheers Peter, sounds like a plan, think I'll stick with the Samsungs or something similar :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by peterb

AS for WD green drives being unsuitable, that isn't something I have seen reported, but if you are concerned, go for standard, or another reputable make (Samsung for example)

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WD Green are TERRIBLE. They are known for their problems with QNAP NAS systems.