Eco/Green drives in RAID?

[VelcroBP]

I'm building my first RAID10 box and have heard from friends that the Eco/Green drives can cause problems. Is this something to be concerned about?

 

[Blain]

Listen to your mates, stay away from Green drives in a RAID array.
Go with WD RE drives or WD Blacks, Samsung F3R or even the F3's.

Did I mention... Stay away from Green drives for RAID arrays?

 

[hennessy1]

You could always get the wd re4-gp drives.

 

[FishAk]

Don't do it.

By the way, what is your goal?

 

[Cerb]

I'm building my first RAID10 box and have heard from friends that the Eco/Green drives can cause problems. Is this something to be concerned about?

Any non-RAID drives can cause problems.

Drives made (flashed) for RAID won't, regardless of 'green' types or not. However, slower drives like that will be deathly slow on small or random loads, so unless you will only be streaming large files in a serial manner across a slow network, spend a couple more bucks.

 

[hennessy1]

I can attest to their reliability in raid which is very good. As for their speed well it's definitly not what they are made for.

 

[VelcroBP]

@FishAK: My goal is general data archiving (music,videos,pics, etc.) w/ redundancy.

@hennessy1: I've been told that consumer WD drives do not have TLER.. is that the case with the re4-gp?

 

[FishAk]

Data archiving with redundancy is best achieved with simple backups. That isn't the purpose of RAID. If you wish for performance with redundancy, that's different, and still requires a separate backup volume for safety. But green drives aren't associated with speed.

It's not necessarily required to use disks that limit error recovery with RAID.

For instance, RAID cards are available that won't kick drives off an array just because the disk doesn't respond for a few minutes.

Another technique using Intel's ICH10R is to make a small part of a 4 disk set to RAID 0, and use the rest of the drives capacity in RAID 10. For some reason, with part of the disks assigned to RAID 0, the Intel controller is more reluctant to drop a drive. I'm using that setup with 4 1TB WD Caviar Blacks, and it's been working great.

In any case, RAID is for performance enhancement, which excludes green drives. Green drives are appropriate for backups, which is for data safety.

 

[VelcroBP]

Looks like I was completely misguided on the whole purpose of a RAID. I'll stick to some good folder-syncing software for data protection then.

Perhaps in the future I'll upgrade to a RAID when I want to drop some more $ on drives. For this build, though, I'm dropping the $$ for performance elsewhere.

Thanks for the guidance!!

 

[Golgatha]

Data archiving with redundancy is best achieved with simple backups. That isn't the purpose of RAID. If you wish for performance with redundancy, that's different, and still requires a separate backup volume for safety. But green drives aren't associated with speed.

It's not necessarily required to use disks that limit error recovery with RAID.

For instance, RAID cards are available that won't kick drives off an array just because the disk doesn't respond for a few minutes.

Another technique using Intel's ICH10R is to make a small part of a 4 disk set to RAID 0, and use the rest of the drives capacity in RAID 10. For some reason, with part of the disks assigned to RAID 0, the Intel controller is more reluctant to drop a drive. I'm using that setup with 4 1TB WD Caviar Blacks, and it's been working great.

In any case, RAID is for performance enhancement, which excludes green drives. Green drives are appropriate for backups, which is for data safety.

Excellent advice. RAID0 is for performance enhancement and RAID1 is to maximize uptime. RAID1/0 maximizes both.

If you're actually wanting backups, it's best to keep 2 copies on physically separate discs at the same location, and then rotate (2 drives...Take one offsite, exchange it with your 2nd offsite drive, and bring the 2nd drive back with you) external drives to an offsite storage location to be prepared for extreme cases (e.g. house burns down).

I personally use Microsoft SyncToy 2.1 64bit to keep the 2 home copies synced with one another, and also rotate 2x2TB external USB 3.0 drives into a waterproof safe at work. I use Acronis TI 2010 to make full disc backups of my OS and Games partitions, and I take the time to validate each image once it's made. Haven't lost any data yet using this method.

 

[deimos3428]

Depends on what you're planning on doing with your RAID, of course.

I'm running three Seagate 2TB green drives in my Synology NAS, mostly because they're relatively cheap. They work just fine to store my movie collection in one big volume, performance is more than sufficient (~60 MBps), and backups are not really required as the original DVDs are sitting on the bookshelf. (I occasionally perform a manual backup of whatever smaller files I put on the NAS to an external volume.)

 

[FishAk]

Depends on what you're planning on doing with your RAID, of course... They work just fine to store my movie collection in one big volume

That's a good point. One advantage of RAID 0 is that multiple disks appear as one. This is convenient for a large data-set. Unfortunately, it's not so safe, since one failed drive can destroy the whole set, making backups even more important.

backups are not really required as the original DVDs are sitting on the bookshelf.

You might want to rethink that.

1. DVDs are known to deteriorate over time.

2. Think about the time it took you to rip all your DVD, and catalog them. Do you really want to be forced to go through that again if you loose a disk? How much is your time worth?

 

[Tinymacrocosm]

Been using 5 WD 2TB Green drives in software Raid 5 in my Windows Homer Server 2011 box, and 2 WD 1TB Green drives in my main box in hardware striped RAID.

My server stores mostly movies. My main box stores largely just games. My main box has the OS running on 60 GB SSD.

I find the setup to work quite well. The "dont use green drives in RAID" warnings are exaggerated. They are, however, less than ideal, and you can get better performance with different drives. My concern was primary mass storage.

 

[corkyg]

I was unaware that original, commercially produced optical disks deteriorate over time. I've never had a trace of that happening. If it means home recorded opticals (laser burned lacquer) - then yes. But Delmost said "original."

 

[FishAk]

Been using 5 WD 2TB Green drives in software Raid 5

I hope you also have a backup plan. With 10TB, if you have a single disk failure you are most likely doomed.

1. You could be victim of silent parity errors that cause the entire array to be lost with a single disk failure. (look up "write hole")

2. Rebuilding that much data takes so long that you are in a higher risk of loosing a seccond drive before the array is rebuilt- resulting in total loss.

3. With that large of an array, you have a better chance that you will encounter an flipped bit than not. This would mess up parity, resulting again, in total loss.

Consider running RAID 0 instead of RAID 5. Yes, a single disk failure will absolutely destroy the entire data-set instead of just probably. But you gain more volume (no need to dedicate room to parity), and you will be more enclined to keep good backups because you won't be under the illusion that your array is redundant.

 

[FishAk]

I was unaware that original, commercially produced optical disks deteriorate over time.

Thanks for that corkyg. I was unaware that commercial disks didn't also have that drawback.

So the only disadvantage of relying on original DVDs is the time required to re-rip, and the space they consume... and I suppose their vulnerability to fire/flood... Magnetic disks share this vulnerability, but they are easier to copy and store off-site because they don't take up so much room.

 

[deimos3428]

You might want to rethink that.

1. DVDs are known to deteriorate over time.

2. Think about the time it took you to rip all your DVD, and catalog them. Do you really want to be forced to go through that again if you loose a disk? How much is your time worth?

Good points all. But in my case, DVDs deteriorate a *lot* faster when small children try to use 'em. Putting them on the NAS has probably saved a dozen DVDs already.

 

[VelcroBP]

@Golgatha: I'm currently using DOpus 10's built in Synchronize tool. Works pretty well, although manual. I'll look into the disc imaging suggestion, as I've never used that method to back up my OS disc before. This will actually be the first machine where I will ONLY have OS & apps on my main drive (in this case a 120-240gb SSD most likely). About how long does Acronis take to create and vailidate an image, on average?

 

[Mark R]

Whether the green drives are a problem in RAID depends on your RAID system.

For linux software RAID (e.g. many home NAS boxes) they work perfectly. No problems at all.

For most other types of RAID, drives may drop out of the RAID from time to time, because they've taken an unusually long time to spin-up from sleep, or because they've hit a bad, or weak, sector.