Harddrive shall I use it?

[jordi.c]

hello,

At the moment I have two Hitachi T7K500 (500GB each) CLICK

I read everybody is using ES drives from Seagate, Hitachi etc. Now I saw on the Hitachi website they also have the "E" version called E7K500 CLICK

In the documentation stands hot-plug by the E7K500 serie this is not in the document of the T7K500 anyway I read a lot of spinning up and down of Harddrives. Do you think the T7K500 can do this?

Now I think I know the letters stands for;
T = for desktops and the E= enterprise

Shall I sell my current 2xT7K500 Hitachi 500GB drives and buy 3x of the E7K500? Are the T7K500 made for a NAS?

I use the NAS for home use streaming music/video's and backing-up data from pc's.

I need another drive for RAID5 don't know what to buy now

Hope somebody have suggestions for me.

Kind Regards,
Jordi

[Jay]

If you are using RAID 5 you want all the disks the same. I know a lot of people may think that if its ther same size it will be fine but why risk it?

RAID 5 is serious s**t so go with all the drives the same or you could be sorry.

when i setup my RAID I went for WesternDigital Raid Edition drives as the chipset on the actual drive is designed to be installed in a RAID setup.

If you are one user then I would say that the T series would be fine. E series is made to higher standards but is really exprected to be under stress 24/7

eg

I have some DL380 servers with SCSI 15K drives. Each server is Citrix / terminal servers so the drive is reading and writing constant 24/7 by 30 users at a time, it never stops. I assume that this is what the E is expected to do. Even if you torrent 24/7 you will not put the type of strain that an E drive is exprected to withstand.

If you can afford it then do it as the E disks should be more reliable in the long run but if you can't afford it then the T should be ok, just make sure that if your using RAID 5 to try and keep the drives the same.

[jordi.c]

Thanks Jay for your advice!

[Steve]

The idea that disks have to be identical for them to work in RAID is a little misguided. RAID is designed so that if a drive dies you can replace it.

What if you can't get exactly the right model when you come to replace a disk?

Of course, when buying the initial array, buy all the same type; you'll get the full capacity the disks can provide (minus RAID overheads). If you need to replace, try to get the same model, if not you'll need >= the capacity of the other disks, assuming the array uses all the disk space.

I'm not sure selling on two disks and buying three more is going to be economical. I'd like to see some actual proof that shelling out for three "enterprise" drives actually delivers better performance/reliability over their "desktop" equivalents.

If I was in your situation I'd just buy a third disk of the same model as the ones you have now

[jordi.c]

The idea that disks have to be identical for them to work in RAID is a little misguided. RAID is designed so that if a drive dies you can replace it.

What if you can't get exactly the right model when you come to replace a disk?

Of course, when buying the initial array, buy all the same type; you'll get the full capacity the disks can provide (minus RAID overheads). If you need to replace, try to get the same model, if not you'll need >= the capacity of the other disks, assuming the array uses all the disk space.

I'm not sure selling on two disks and buying three more is going to be economical. I'd like to see some actual proof that shelling out for three "enterprise" drives actually delivers better performance/reliability over their "desktop" equivalents.

If I was in your situation I'd just buy a third disk of the same model as the ones you have now

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your input .

I will get me another T7K500 and buy me the Thecus N5200 Pro at the end of this week .

@Steve, can you explain me the benefit of a Gigabit Ethernet card? I just don't get it why a 100mbps networkcard is not fast enough? While the read/write performance of the Thecus N5200B Pro will never exceed 60mb/sec.

[Steve]

100Mbps = ~10MB/sec

[jordi.c]

[Funkstar]

Networking is measured in megabits per second, that data transfer speed measurement is in megabytes per second. Hence:
100mbps ethernet = 100/8 = 12.5MBps

But you have Over head in that 100mbps which takes the usable bandwidth down to 8-10MBps.

Gigabit ethernet maxes out about 75MBps. So just a bit higher than the N5200 can sustain.

[jordi.c]

Networking is measured in megabits per second, that data transfer speed measurement is in megabytes per second. Hence:
100mbps ethernet = 100/8 = 12.5MBps

But you have Over head in that 100mbps which takes the usable bandwidth down to 8-10MBps.

Gigabit ethernet maxes out about 75MBps. So just a bit higher than the N5200 can sustain.

OK, Now I understand it finally . Never thought about the difference between megabits and bytes until now

Pain in the ass is that I bought last week a Linksys 5 ports switch based on 100mbps (megabits). I will make a friend happy

Just tested it between two pc's copying a 100Megabyte file (on a LAN). The speed was 6MB/sec. So I really need to boost these baby's!!

I will replace all the network cards in my pc for read/write performance higher than 10MB/sec. This is the card I'm looking for CLICK HERE.

Cheers
Jordi

[Funkstar]

Looks good. you can't go too far wrong with Intel network cards. 30 euro is pretty good too.