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Suggestion for WD 150GB raptor SATA drives replacement.

mxnerd

mxnerd

Diamond Member
As title.

I (actually my uncle) bought 3 10,000 RPM Raptor drives and use it in a SBS 2003 environment. And 2 of them had gone bad in past 8 months (with 5 year warranty)!

It started with 3-drive RAID-5, then I downgrade it to 2-drive RAID-1 after one drive died 4 months earlier , and 2nd drive died this thursday.

This is an environment with very light traffic, less than 10 users with not much data retriving activity and I suppose the setup would be more than enough, yet the drives died in a very short time in usage. The case is big enough and there are enough fans to keep the drives cool.

Did I just happen to get very unlucky to buy a bad batch? Or WD drives are just not good enough for server environment?

What is your suggestion for the replacement? Seagate? (heard a lot of bad things about their drive recently) Other lines of WD? or SAS drives (which brand)? But I wonder whether my client (my uncle) willing to dish out big money for SAS drives.

Thanks!!!
 
drives fail all the time. did you buy them new? doesn't sound like you were rebuilding your arrays after they failed. SAS drives will fail too. if the case is too big, your air flow might not be enough. note how servers are dense and thin. not only is this for high density racking, but for ease of cooling. Seagate Cheetah NS ST3400755SS 400 drive would make a good replacement suggestion IMO or the ST3450856SS if you got the cash or don't mind buyiny some white lables off ebay.
 
Bad batches most certainly do exist, in hard drives and everything else. It's one of the risks in a RAID array, since drives are often of the same batch.

You didn't describe the failure modes of the hard drives, nor your power supply, RAID card, etc., but those could all be factors in making a recommendation. I've only put Raptors into one SBS server, and that was only because the client already owned another pair of them. I worry about them holding up over the long term in a server. But WD's specifications seem to say they should be OK.

I've had all sorts of drives in SBS servers over the past five years, and I can't say that one type is more reliable than the next. I've seen IDE, SATA, and SCSI drives and SO FAR, only the SATA drives (the majority of my installations) have had no drive failures. But that's certainly just luck. Those will fail, too.

If it was me, I'd:

1) Examine the power supply voltages, looking for abnormalities. If the power supply isn't a name brand, I'd replace it with a high-end supply.
2) Buy three server-rated SATA drives. Right now, I'd probably go for the WD SE series.
Edit: Whoops. As Blain notes later, I meant RE, not SE.
3) Put two of the drives into RAID 1, with the third as a hot-spare
4) Enable the audible alarm and email warnings on the RAID card.
5) Replace all the SATA data cables with new ones and make sure they're solidly connected at both ends.
6) Make sure there are ongoing backups, with monthly tests of the backups.
7) Monitor disk temperatures and disk SMART errors (if your RAID card allows it) for a while to watch for abnormalities.
 
The drives are brand new purchased from Newegg.

I did re-create RAID-1 volume and re-install the O.S. when the first drive died.

The case is a 5U rackmount case with one 12-inch fan and 3 drives (2 for RAID-1, one for backup)

The RAID is Intel Matrix on ABIT IP35 PRO XE. CPU is Q9450.

Power supply is dual 400W hot swappable, (My uncle purchased it, I don't know what brand, he thought it's 400Wx2 = 800W)

My uncle is a client who likes to purchase the parts himself and ask me to assemble for him. He was a very small motherboard/add-on cards vendor 18 years ago. Once he heard some suggestion from me, he purchased the parts himself but always off the standard I like or recommended.

I ask him to purchase INTEL motherboard only, and he keeps buying cheaper motherboards made by ASUS, ABIT or Gigabyte.

Backups are done daily and works perfectly.


Thanks for all the suggestions. I think I'll urge my uncle to switch to SAS drives and I'll check the power supply.

I'm really tired of serving a client who won't listen.
 
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