SATA drives for Mediasonic HFR2-SU3S2 PRORAID

[Peroxyde]

Hi,

I would like to build an external USB/eSATA storage using
Mediasonic HFR2-SU3S2 PRORAID. For this whole build, the reliability factor is more important than speed performance. The cost must also be reasonable.

I will use RAID 1 (mirroring). The number of drives will be 2 drives for the beginning and if I am happy, I will add two more drives.

Q1. In SATA drives, what is the capacity which is more reliable? 1GB, 1.5GB or 2 GB? I have read somewhere (may be in Ars Technica but I don't remember the link) that higher density requires more error correction. So I wonder if 2 GB drive would experience more failure down the road.

Q2. I have also heard of Time Limited Error Recovery which may not be implemented in some models Desktop drives. In short, which brand & models of SATA drives do you recommend to used in RAID 1?

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[tinkererguy]

Already bought one, can't seem to get past issue I'm having, where a "quick" format takes an hour, then copying a few files, progress nearly stops, with throughput dropping to nearly 0. I'm using striped RAID setting, with just 2 2TB drives, and this happens with eSATA, USB 3, and even USB 3, using either Win 7 x64 or Windows Home Server (Windows Server 2003 x86). Tried 2 drive RAID spanning, same issue.

I just haven't yet figured out if it's settings on my drives, or something else...

 

[tinkererguy]

I'm using 2 Western Digital [FONT=&quot]WD20EADS 2TB drives.

[/FONT]Tried setting "WDIDLE3 /D" to disabled to prevent drives from idling,

And WDTLER setting to ON, by running "TLER-ON.bat"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery

discussed here
http://forum.ncixus.com/forums/inde...03&product_id=36130&msgcount=29&overclockid=0
among many other sites.

Also tried various Write-caching policy settings (Windows Device Manager, Drive Properties, Policies tab) on the drive, no difference.

Any other ideas?