RAID6: Samsung or WD?

[Albuquerque]

Your opinion counts

I'm building a new 2008 R2 server that will act as a VM host for a plethora of boxes, to include a WHS 2011 instance, another 2008R2 instance for hosting some online games (MineCraft, some old Telnet games), and some other nonsense. Because the box will be running 24/7 and will only occasionally get "busy", I'm going to spec it out with equipment with good idle power characteristics. And because it will be serving as the backup instance for all my other home Windows devices thanks to WHS, I need to make sure that data doesn't go off the deep end.

I'm going to stack it all up using laptop drives: a pair of WD Scorpio Black 320GB drives in RAID1 + Z77 caching SSD for the OS and apps volume, and then eight 1TB 9.5mm laptop drives all connected to a Highpoint 2720 SGL in RAID6 for the data volume.

The question is: which 1TB laptop drives to use? You decide

[Solaris17]

which one do you like better?

[Jizzler]

The cheapest ones?

Seems a bit elaborate for what you need. Not that I'm against such things, but sometimes the more practical solution wins out - like 5-6 drives on the motherboard controller. When that's outlived, then I'd expand to another controller.

[Albuquerque]

Motherboard (Z77 Mini-ATX) controller will be 'busy doing a pair of WD Scorpio Black 320Gb drives in RAID1 along with an SSD for caching

Want to talk about elaborate? Look at my system specs

[Aquinus]

Originally Posted by Jizzler

The cheapest ones?

Seems a bit elaborate for what you need. Not that I'm against such things, but sometimes the more practical solution wins out - like 5-6 drives on the motherboard controller. When that's outlived, then I'd expand to another controller.

Just makes sure they support some form of TLER.

If you have the money and want an enterprise drive solution consider WD RE4 as they're built specifically for RAID.
http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=30

Originally Posted by Albuquerque

Motherboard (Z77 Mini-ATX) controller will be 'busy doing a pair of WD Scorpio Black 320Gb drives in RAID1 along with an SSD for caching

Want to talk about elaborate? Look at my system specs

It's not that elaborate. How fast does the SSD RAID go because my two Force GTs hit 1gb/s easy.

[Cotton_Cup]

well just go grab either both are good but if your going to raid samsung might be a better choice (not sure about this as western digital got bad raid or something by what people say and I am not sure about that)

[Jizzler]

Originally Posted by Albuquerque

Motherboard (Z77 Mini-ATX) controller will be 'busy doing a pair of WD Scorpio Black 320Gb drives in RAID1 along with an SSD for caching

Want to talk about elaborate? Look at my system specs

Oh silly me, I should have gathered from your post that you wanted a Rube Goldberg approach to your server. Some times it needs to be spelled out for me to catch on.

Originally Posted by Aquinus

Just makes sure they support some form of TLER.

If you have the money and want an enterprise drive solution consider WD RE4 as they're built specifically for RAID.
http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=30

I will... when it matters. Not so much here.

[Albuquerque]

What part of "laptop drives" did the two of you miss?

And as for Rube Goldberg? In what way? RAID1 + Caching for OS and apps, and a RAID6 volume for data via an 8-port SAS RAID card. Unless of course it's a "Rube Goldberg" approach because I'm not using twenty 15,000RPM enterprise SCSI drives plumbed into my own $10,000 SAN device that feeds a $4000 5U racked server?

No. I'm building a server for home with good idle power characteristics which will be based on commodity hardware using low power devices such as laptop drives. Not a big ask, if you look around...

[ERazer]

have you google about TLER if ur serious about RAID

NM you want laptop drives

i would go with blue WD then, i never have bad experience with WD

[Jizzler]

Originally Posted by Albuquerque

And as for Rube Goldberg? In what way? RAID1 + Caching for OS and apps, and a RAID6 volume for data via an 8-port SAS RAID card. Unless of course it's a "Rube Goldberg" approach because I'm not using twenty 15,000RPM enterprise SCSI drives plumbed into my own $10,000 SAN device that feeds a $4000 5U racked server?

No... that would be even more elaborate then your current plan, to point of being needlessly
excessive. Perhaps we we're thinking of two different Rube Goldbergs.

Originally Posted by Albuquerque

No. I'm building a server for home with good idle power characteristics which will be based on commodity hardware using low power devices such as laptop drives. Not a big ask, if you look around...

Exactly. You have simple needs which is why I gave a simple setup suggestion. If you have other reasons for planning it out as you have then by all means, continue on. It can even be "because I want to" - I've used that plenty of times for doing things the way I do.

[Albuquerque]

Your suggestion doesn't work within the guidelines I have provided (there are no Mini ATX motherboard that support eight RAID slots, and I'm not aware of ANY that support RAID6), so please provide another one.

[W1zzard]

get the cheapest ones as raid 6 will provide plenty of protection against hdd failure

[Albuquerque]

Cheapest is probably the Sammy, but only by like $2 depending on where they're purchased from (Amazon for the WD, vs NewEgg for the Sammy.) I posted this same question on another forum that I am a long-time member of, and everyone there is leaning towards WD as well.

[Solaris17]

Originally Posted by Albuquerque

Cheapest is probably the Sammy, but only by like $2 depending on where they're purchased from (Amazon for the WD, vs NewEgg for the Sammy.) I posted this same question on another forum that I am a long-time member of, and everyone there is leaning towards WD as well.

WD is a very old company. but any HDD is prone to failure. honestly between the sammy and the WD i dont think either is more susceptible to failure then the other. just go for the one thats cheaper.

[dhdude]

I'd go WD as those Scorpio Blues are amazing drives for the money, and I've had a few problems with a few recent Samsung drives in RAID

[theeldest]

The only reason I'd recommend against the Western Digital is due to lack of RAID support in their non RE series of drives.

But I'm not sure if this extends to their 2.5" drives.

Do you need laptop drives? or just 2.5" drives? (ie: are 15mm 2.5" drives going to fit in your enclosure? or do we need to stick to <9mm?)

[Sasqui]

Do the WD Blue laptop drives support RAID? I've read plenty of complaints that the desktop Black versions don't...

[FordGT90Concept]

Neither. Seagate Constellation or Western Digital XE.

If you're looking to save money, switch to 3.5" drives and look at the Western Digital RE4 and Seagate Constellation ES drives.

[theeldest]

Ok, let's get some concrete power numbers. I'm going to look at the Idle power as I don't know if that controller will let drives go to standby.

Summary
WD Blue: 0.89 Watts
Seagate 7200rpm: 2.95 Watts (15mm z-height)
Samsung: 0.7 Watts


My thoughts
Depending on how much load you actually put on the storage during peak usage the upgrade from 5400 to 7200 may be worth your while. Even at about 3 watts per drive, you end up better than 3.5" drives (5 3.5" 5400 rpm drives in RAID6 = 25.5 watts @ idle; 8 2.5" 7200rpm drives in RAID6 = 23.6 watts).

The seagate is obviously more expensive, but if you would like performance it may be a viable option (you can buy it here).

Otherwise the Samsung will use less power and we know it's not purposely crippled for RAID setups whereas the Western Digital may be crippled (TLER).

Sources
Western Digital 2.5" 1TB 5400rpm Scorpio Blue
Current Requirements
Power Dissipation
Read/Write 1.4 Watts
Idle 0.59 Watts
Standby 0.18 Watts
Sleep 0.18 Watts

Seagate 2.5" 1TB 7200rpm Constellation
Idle 2.95 Watts
Read/Write 3.84 Watts

Samsung 1TB 5400rpm Spinpoint
Read/Write 2.2 Watts
Idle 0.7 Watts
Standby 0.2 Watts

Samsung 2TB 5400rpm F4 review

[FordGT90Concept]

Constellation is an enterprise 7200 RPM drive, the rest are consumer 5400 RPM drives. Different categories.

[theeldest]

Originally Posted by FordGT90Concept

Constellation is an enterprise 7200 RPM drive, the rest are consumer 5400 RPM drives. Different categories.

Added a note on 15mm z-height for the constellation.

[Jizzler]

Originally Posted by Sasqui

Do the WD Blue laptop drives support RAID? I've read plenty of complaints that the desktop Black versions don't...

"RAID Support Yes/No" doesn't exist, or at least I don't believe it's as cut and dry as others make it out to be.

WD recommends Greens/Blues/Blacks for RAID with limitations. Currently those limitations are:

- Used in consumer RAID solutions (ICHxR, SBxxx, some dedicated, some software)
- RAID-0 or RAID-1 only.
- No more than two drives in an array.

There is an exception to the last two. If you're a system builder which provides support to the end-user, you may use these drives in larger and more complex RAID arrays. For all other situations WD recommends their enterprise-level drives.

Being my own system builder, I test and support my own arrays

[FordGT90Concept]

Any kind of drive can be used in any kind of RAID. RAID is a controller technology, not a drive technology.

Those exceptions are listed because they don't want people complaining to them about frequent hard drive failures in a RAID. Remember that all RAIDs have their limitations on number of failures. Exceed that number, all data is lost.

[theeldest]

Originally Posted by FordGT90Concept

Any kind of drive can be used in any kind of RAID. RAID is a controller technology, not a drive technology.

Those exceptions are listed because they don't want people complaining to them about frequent hard drive failures in a RAID. Remember that all RAIDs have their limitations on number of failures. Exceed that number, all data is lost.

There's a specific issue with Western Digital non-RE series drives and support for TLER. When the time to recover from an error is too long then the drives will act as if they're unresponsive and be dropped from the RAID.

In the past, TLER could be enabled on all of Western Digital's drives. But to move RAID users to the RE series they imposed a block on enabling TLER on desktop drives.

So, yes, there are limitations to which drives can be used with which controllers. Some controllers can get around this problem. I am unfamiliar with the controller the OP mentioned.


Western Digital
Wikipedia

[Jizzler]

"Problem" doesn't seem like the right word here. Earlier you could adjust the TLER value, but you didn't have to when using the drive in a consumer RAID situation. They have such long timeouts that if one of my drives actually exceeded it - I'd be glad that it got dropped. It's not a workaround, it's just how it is.

What was happening before the block was IT departments buying dozens to hundreds of Black drives, adjusting the TLER value and using them on controllers with stricter timeouts. To WD, each box (20 drives) of Blacks sold where RE should have been used was a loss of ~$2K. With that kind of savings, it was easy to have spares on hand to cope with the marginally higher failure rate. WD didn't block TLER to squeeze consumers for more coin, they did it so IT would fall in line with their product tiers

However I also agree a bit with Ford. Drives are not the only fruit in a RAID salad - there's the bios/drivers/etc. Passing support to system builders who will validate their systems was smart.