• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

7200.11 1.5, caviar green 1.5, caviar black 1.5, raid 5?

J

jkresh

Platinum Member
I am about to buy a couple of drives (probably 4) and build a raid 5 array (looking at a card based on Intels iop348, probably the highpoint because it?s so much less then the equivalent areca/Adaptec). I will start with 4 drives (will basically use this to replace all my current storage besides maybe 1 external and my velociraptor). Looking at the Seagate 1.5, the WD 1 or 1.5. since my case is limited to 6 drives (unless I go external or use the 5inch bays) I like the idea of using 1.5s as with 4 drives that is a significant upgrade in storage over what I have (4.5 vs around 2.5) while the 1tb would be much less of an increase. The seagates are about $30 less per drive then the wd green but seem to have had reliability issues, they also are faster than the green (at least for seek). Any comments/suggestions as to drive or controllers would be appreciated.

array would be used to backup my raptor, store games, ripped dvd's (from my collection), recorded tv shows..., maybe some lite database use as well.
 
Explain why you think a RAID 5 array would benefit your usage over a single HD or a few non-RAIDed HDs.
Click to expand...

Presumably the same reasons RAID is usually an advantage over a single drive. The main two being the management one large volume is easier than multiple smaller ones and the ability to recover from and still run after one drive fails. And a secondary benefit is that read speeds are better.
 
The best deal is probably still at 1 TB. E.g. the Hitachi at $88. E.g do the math for 6TB actual capacity, and it comes ahead of the 1.5 TB Seagate by a bit. This will change in time as more higher-capacity drives become available though, so your best bet as always would be to wait.

You can add a multi-drive cage such as the Coolermaster STB-3T4 (assuming it fits and you have room) for additional drives + cooling.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16817993002

That's a lot of data to risk though -- e..g with a power supply failure which wipes out all your drives, so I'd add to the budget something for an external backup of at least the critical data.
 
Blain, main reason is I have had drive failures in the past and raid 5 would limit the chance that a drive failure would cause me to loose data (I am aware that raid is not the same as backing up and will have anything vital in at least one other location).
Madwand1, you are right that the hitachi's would be better price/performance wise, but I only have 2 5inch bayes open and my hard drive cage holds 6 drives (1 is used by the velociraptor) so while I could go with 5 1tb drives and be fine for now it would limit my expansion capabilites over the 1.5's.
 
took a look in my case, realized that because of the internal radiators I have the 6 drive cage, + 1 external 3.5 bay, available, and maybe one of the 5.25's (1 has optical, the other two could only take something that is short) , so a max of 8 drives (7 for the raid, starting with 4), so I am all but decided on the 1.5's and based on the reviews I think I will just go with the wd green's (now priced slightly better per gigabyte then the 1tb blacks) as the seagates seem to have to high a failure rate.

probably will order 4 green's and the highpoint in the next day or so, will post back with benchmarks when it is setup.
wired247, I know areca is really good and if I don't like the results from the highpoint I will go with them, but for half the price its hard not to try the highpoint.
 
Blain, the wd greens are slowest theoretically, but the bigger platters means from what I have seen their read/writes are similar to the black (the 1.5 and 2tb greens anyway), seek is better with the black. Main reason for going with the 1.5tb greens is that they are the only currently available 1.5tb drives with 500gig platters (and the seagates while a little faster seem to have a really high failure rate). If anyone says the seagates are fixed then I would go with them as their price/gb is the best of any of the drives, but the reviews at newegg are kind of scary (26% or about 270 reveiws with a 1, to 50% or 550 with a 5), seems that the new firmware has helped and with newegg's return policy I could just order 4 of the seagates and stress test them for a few days and if any fails go with the wd but I don't know. The 1tb caviar black has a similar nubmer of reviews and only 5% are a 1, if there was a caviar black 1.5 (or any true 7200rpm vs the 5400/7200 of the green I would go with it )
 
I had a big thread at XS before it went down.

A portion of it was salvaged at Salvaged 1.5TB Seagate data.

That link has the wrong image for Raid 1 (basically single drive performance so you can see that one: Raid 1 STX 7200.11 1.5 TB Performance

My main system is running 8x Seagate Savvio 15k drives, 3x 300GB 15k.5's, and 3x 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 drives all in raid 5. My new WHS system is running 8x 7200.11's 1.5TB's in Raid 6 along with 2x 1TB 7200.11's.

I do worry about drive failure, but I have backups and raids very well covered at this point. I will say that the new firmware drives, that have been shipping for the past 30-45 days (and some earlier) are fine. I did lose an old firmware drive but the Seagate RMA process is very easy.

Just as a side note, I bought so many drives to backup all of my PC's, servers, laptops/netbooks, because they were on sale at dell for <$90 with free shipping. Fry's had the retail packages for $117 each this weekend so they are very inexpensive.

Spindle drives fail. The more you have, the more that fail. With 22 Seagate drives running at home (not including the rock-solid 7200.10's I have) I've seen my expected failure rate and I'm a convert from the 500GB WD drives that 2 of 4 have died on me.

To each their own though and odds are the newer tech 1.5TB's are faster.

Also, some people have reported issues with SATA drives on the IOP348 which is why all of mine are on IOP333's (Adaptec 31605 and 3085). The IOP348 I use (5805) is dedicated to the 15k 2.5" SAS array.
 
pjkenned, interesting information, of the 11 7200.11 1.5tbs you have had 1 failure? What kind of coolign are you using, since some have reported that the drives run hot I am wondering if soem of the failures (outside of the firmware issues) have been heat related (which should not be an issue in my case

as an aside, any idea as to what happened to xs?
 
Responded via PM in more detail, but the basic points are:
1. Cooling was an open cage 4 in 3 serviced by a 120mm fan. This is not an issue as the rest of the drives are happy in 5 in 3 trayless hotswap enclosures. It was a classic firmware brick and was on an old FW with issues.
2. The drives run "hot" to a lot of people, but once you use 15k rpm drives, it is really a relative question 🙂
3. XS has been dead for days. It sounded like a SSD transition that may have gone bad last Thursday, but at this point they either lost data (another reminder to back up like crazy) or something else. I saw on report of someone seeing a you've been hacked page but no second confirmation.

Just as a quick update, I uploaded some Atto benchmarks of Raid 0, Raid 5, Raid 50 on Vista Ultimate x64 using the Dell Perc 5/i which is a great and cheap raid controller albeit with limited performance. See http://www.servethehome.com/ for the benchmarks. I will add some more on the Adaptec 31605 and WHS tomorrow night.
 
lots of good info pjkenned, I had looked at the perc5i (its cheap) but I saw some people mentioning issues with it and x58, with the highpoint 4320 being so reasonably priced I am pretty much set on it (though more cache would be nice),

your luck with the 7200.11's seems to be pretty good, but so many have listed major issues, (and there are constant rediculous deals which suggest that inventory is high because people don't trust the drives), I just don't know. for 75% of the price of the wd the seagates are a great deal, and having 2 out of 4 fail seems to be unlikely but I don't know (and with the $20-$25 for them to cross ship the rma, a couple of failures would have the price about match the wd), + the 3 platter design for the wd vs the 4 for the seagate is nice.

 
I wholeheartedly agree that the new WD drives are probably better as they are simply newer technology. Actually, the 1.5TB Seagate prices have been trending upwards lately. I am not sure if this is due to the fact that they fixed the firmware or if Seagate was thinking that the 7200.12 2TB version would be pumped out before its competitors hit 1.5TB and the old pricing was to gain market share.

Shipping wise, Priority Mail was <$11. So if you wanted to be safe I would do the cost/GB analysis based upon an expected STX failure rate versus WD. Also, to be safe, I would never store data on these in Raid 0, even though I have a general level of faith in them at this point. Plus, raid 5 tends to be fine with dedicated controllers in terms of speed and having a bit of failure protection is always nice.

The landscape has certainly changed with the new technology drives hitting the market. On the other hand the 7200.11 1.5TB drives are currently the victim of prior bad firmware leading to a lot of parroting about how bad they are, when in reality, raid 5 with these drives offers a super affordable and darn fast setup when you are doing media serving and backups. People looking at 1.5TB drives usually are not doing 4KB writes to them as that much storage tends to attract users with large files.
 
I started planning this setup about 2 months ago (around the time the 7200.12 500gig drives came out), hoping the 7200.12 would be out by march so I could use them (assuming their price was close), but still not out.

I have no question that the raid 5 setup (with either drive) will be fast, its still the reliability issues which bother me, as while I can't believe the drives have a >25% failure rate, and I know that a lot of people who don't have problems never bother to post, the amount of people posting about how terrible their experience with the drives has been is more then I have seen for any other drive ever (and I actually had an IBM 75gxp which ran for years, and was the last drive I saw something close to this with).
 
Yes, that had me concerned also, alas, my experience, and those that I have seen are mostly caused by firmware. Even without that, any mechanical drive will fail at some point, but after a non-firmware failure googling the "7200.11 1.5TB failure" would still show all of the firmware failures.

Not trying to persuade you to get the 7200.11's at all, they are not cutting edge tech, and realistically they are just a cheap platform for large storage arrays at this point. My only goal is to provide a counterpoint to all of that static around the HORRIBLE firmware that Seagate put on these drives. To be clear, my experiences with the old firmware, along with countless others is nothing short of abysmal. Yet the firmware has been updated so if you have a drive with the new firmware I think you are again in the normal spindle drive failure rate territory.
 
Too true. They have been down for a week now which is wild for 2009.

The XS item I was referring to was a thread where I posted a ton of different configurations with 8x 1.5TB Seagate drives.

Very interesting to note how bad WHS's disk performance is though (of course more benches of that soon).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top