500GB 7200rpm drives that support RAID?

[Matt_Stevens]

It seems to be very difficult to find out of hard drives support RAID, other than the overpriced RAID editions.

I love my Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB, but their RAID edition, the F3R is 1TB and twice the price.

Are there any 500GB drives that will support RAID? RAID 0 to be exact.

Currently I have two Samsung F3's in a RAID 0 but want to move them out of RAID for drives that support it when I can. Two 1TB drives would be overkill and a half. I won't need 2TB for what I'll be doing. Two 500GB drives will be more than enough.

Thanks

 

[dac7nco]

Pretty much any pair of identical drives will do fine in RAID-0 (RAID-0 being an oxymoron). You don't need RE drives for RAID-0 or RAID-10. I've been running 500GB F3s in RAID-10 for 1.5 years, with no sign of trouble. IMO the only desktop drive faster & more reliable than the F3/500 is the F4/320. Edit: Faster in sequential R/W, not in random; WD has an edge there. I'm getting 278MB/s off of a 931TB RAID-10.

Daimon

 

[Matt_Stevens]

It's tough to know what to do when some say as you do and other say the RAID 0 will degrade and drop out without special drives.

 

[dac7nco]

Matt, I've run both Samsung and Hitachi 7200RPM (consumer-level) drives in a RAID-6 NAS for years with excellent success; most of the horror stories you read about in RAID configs are due to "green" drives powering down and falling off of the controller. AFAIK Samsung and Hitachi 7200RPM drives don't do this. I've simply stopped using Hitachi due to their lackluster performance and high noise.

If you're just looking to run RAID-0, then I highly recommend the Samsung drives, as they are fast (sequentially) and use a single platter (320 or 500GB). They're built like a brick shithouse. I have two RAID-10 setups using 4-each Samsung F3s, on two different machines using the ICH10R, without a glitch since Oct'09. Is the RAID going to be your system drive? Scratch Drive? Games? The only difference I can find with the F3R(RAID edition) is the longer warranty & MTBF - I doubt the firmware is different.

I highly doubt the F3R or WD's RE series is more reliable than Samsung's single platter models, especially the 320GB, which only uses one side of a single platter.

Daimon

 

[greenhawk]

It's tough to know what to do when some say as you do and other say the RAID 0 will degrade and drop out without special drives.

on a normal day, it makes no difference.

When a drive develops bad clusters (as they all do over time), then the benifits of the raid edition drives will start to show.

Though as the drives are still a moving part, they can still stopworking for different reasosn that the raid editions will not help with.

For raid 0/1, I would not care enough for the cost to use raid edition drives. Just keep a offline backup of important files.

If I was running a 8 drive raid 5/6 or more, I would consider it as any hickups on that can effect performance quite quickly.

I have run 5 drive raid 5 arrays before without too many issues, but then it was just for storage space, not a operational array in any term of the word.

 

[Matt_Stevens]

Daimon, thanks for that input (you too, greenhawk). My two Samsung F3 500GB's are currently my Adobe CS5 scratch disc. I've barely used it so far, as I have been too busy with other things to edit much. My F3R's are in a mirror and act as the source discs. My fear was that the F3's might not work out since RAID 0 is basically super fast and therefore, I'd need RAID editions. Guess maybe not.

I just bit the bullet and purchased the Synology DS211J along with two Samsung F4 Spinpoint 5400rpm 2TB hdd's so that I can have a 2TB RAID 1 backup. This will give me peace of mind.

My OS hdd is an Intel 120GB SSD and I still need to do a proper backup of it.

 

[Blain]

dac7nco is running a RAID 6 array, which is about as fault tolerant as you can run these days.
RAID 0 is not so forgiving.

 

[Matt_Stevens]

Which brings me back to square one, or, post 1.

 

[Blain]

HD capacity is still dirt cheap, even for raid edition drives.
Buy a couple of 1TB F3Rs and don't look back.

 

[groberts101]

I've used many drives as well and raid edition drives are more suited to specific business applications where one doesn't mind spending more for greater integrity.

Currently run 6 SSD in R0 on the ICH10R, 6 cuda 500's in R0 on Adaptec 5805, 2 in R0 on Marvell 6G, 2 in R0 on JMicron on this system alone. Can even run e-SATA raid if I choose with those drives being kept offline most of the time.

I've never had many problems with R0 at all in the past 12 years and most issues stem from lemon drives, time outs, user error, or just simple hardware deficiencies.

I would say buy what's on sale and based on what others have had good experience with and use another R0 volume as a good fault tolerance method. I'd much rather have an R0 backing up another R0 than 1 R5/R6/R10 array. Works well for me.

 

[dac7nco]

Currently run 6 SSD in R0 on the ICH10R, 6 cuda 500's in R0 on Adaptec 5805, 2 in R0 on Marvell 6G, 2 in R0 on JMicron on this system alone.

I'd much rather have an R0 backing up another R0 than 1 R5/R6/R10 array. Works well for me.

WHAT HAVE YOU SMOKED?!?!

Daimon

 

[groberts101]

WHAT HAVE YOU SMOKED?!?!

Daimon

all the other systems on my block!

 

[dac7nco]

all the other systems on my block!

See #2 in SIG. :awe:

Daimon

 

[groberts101]

LOL.. I didn't even notice. Nice! You the same one over at the OCZ forum with a similar rig?

EDIT: I just went and checked it out and even you will be envious. Check this system out! And FYI, add an LSI-9265 with all the bells and whistles running 8 x Vertex 3's in R0 onto that list. Though now he's finding out getting all those V3's right off the bat might be a little tougher than imagined. LOL

Mobo/Laptop: EVGA SR-2
CPU: Xeon x5680
RAM: Dominator GTVid: Quadro 5000, EVGA GTX 590 Hydro Quad SLI
PSU: ******* AX1200 (x2)Chipset: Intel 5520
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate

PS. I'm glad you don't live on my block so I can still say that without lying.