Which 1TB for RAID?

[jellyrole]

I'm looking to RAID 2 1TB hard drives to have 2TB to store files and also a bit faster speeds, is that possible? If not, speed is the focus.

Which drives should I get?

 

[jellyrole]

Anyone?

 

[va4leo]

Budget?

 

[InnocentCriminal]

Two of these bad boys.

 

[Widjaja]

I don't think it is possible to have both.
To get use of 2TB in raid with 2TB you would have to go something like RAID 5 which basically joins them together as one unit.

A have heard if you lose one of the drives in RAID 5 the data is still recoverable which doesn't make much sense to me but apparently it does work.
Something to do with the algorithms in RAID 5 setup.

But since you are wanting to go for speed, looking at two 2TB drives in RAID 0 would be the way I would go to still have the same amount of drive space you want.

Uncertain of want drives to recommend though.

I have always used WD but have been told by my Brother the Samsung F3 SATA 6.0s he install in someones PC for a brand new build were super fast.
He was so impressed he removed all his other drives and installed a 1TB Samsung into his system.

 

[va4leo]

Two of these bad boys.

+1 Was going to suggest the same thing, but was waiting for a budget xD

 

[Widjaja]

Thats 3 for the samsungs.

 

[va4leo]

RAID 5 will only give you 1.5 TB of storage and the speed with 2 disks would be the same as 1 disc. You clearly want RAID 0.

 

[scaminatrix]

another vore for the F3 1TB. Just make sure it's the HD103SJ as I've noticed two types of F3 1TB's.

 

[slyfox2151]

Raid5 has a minimum of 3 Hard drives, not 2. if you had 3 1TB drives in a Raid5 then you would get 2TB of usable space, the formula for Raid5 is N-1..... so 5-1 is 4 Hard drives are usable and you lose 1 hard drive worth of space due to parity.



Raid0 offers speed, i would also reccomend the Samsung F3s, definetly some of the fastest HDDs around excluding SSDs and raptors.... realisticaly you will get 10-15% less performance for every additial drive you add to a raid0....

so a 2 Disk Raid0 might get you between 85-105% speed incress... adding another drive you might get 80-95% more speed... and so on till about disk 5 or 6.... then you start running into chipset bandwidth problems around 600MBps+





Take this from someone who runs 3 separate Raid0 arrays...... 2Western Digital 640s 2WD 2TB greens and 2 WD 36.6 raptors. i used to have a Raid0 with 2 segate drives but it failed due to power issues.

 

[Loosenut]

I'm leaning more towards these as they are SATA III with nice size cahes

 

[JrRacinFan]

RAID 5 will only give you 1.5 TB of storage and the speed with 2 disks would be the same as 1 disc. You clearly want RAID 0.

Not necessarily. It would give you 50% increased read speeds and about 25% increased write.

Also, I suggest Seagate 7200.12's. Can get them a touch cheaper at a few different etailers, but newegg due to there cust service.

@Loosenut

In theory, the sata3(6gbps) isn't going to help much. Maybe in just burst speed but nothing way more phenomenal. Worth the extra in cost? Probably not.

 

[slyfox2151]

Not necessarily. It would give you 50% increased read speeds and about 25% increased write.

Also, I suggest Seagate 7200.12's.

well no, it depends on what is being read/write... under best conditions you will see upto 90%+ performance.... worst conditions you may see 0% performance incress... or even negative...

SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cac...

is $20 cheaper than the WD black 1TB... when buying multiple HDDs.. it adds up very fast

 

[JrRacinFan]

well no, it depends on what is being read/write... under best conditions you will see upto 90%+ performance.

If it's alot of smaller files, I can see the increase. Of course, though i do agree.

 

[claylomax]

Any of the latest 1Tb drives from Hitachi, WD, Seagate and Samsung will do, they use two 500gb platters, although the Sammys have proved to be the fastest.

 

[slyfox2151]

If it's alot of smaller files, I can see the increase. Of course, though i do agree.

i find very large files to have the best and biggest impact on speed, achiving nearly 100% incress on very large file transfers, if the small files are fragmented at all or not sequential this will have a very severe impact on performance dropping speeds to less then 1mbps...

Any of the latest 1Tb drives from Hitachi, WD, Seagate and Samsung will do, they use two 500gb platters, although the Sammys have proved to be the fastest.

i have herd a few bad things about running the WD green drives in a raid, however i have never had problems with my 2 green drives.. they have been in a Raid0 array for about 16 months now without even the slightest problem.
i only store large media files on the drives so latency is not an issue however slow throughput is when transfering them to other pc's VIA gigabit lan.


they may read @110MBps at the edge of the disk... but the files at the end will be 50% of that speed or possible even less, hence the need for them to be in a raid0 to keep up with the gigabit connection.


Edit:
i hate waiting for files to transfer the more speed the better!

 

[scaminatrix]

Don't get the Western Digital Caviar Black's if you're planning on RAID. I find myself mentioning the TLER feature on the WDCB's more and more recently, and how it's killing these drives when RAID-ed.
The bigger cache and SATA3 sound good, but they don't outweigh the negative features IMO.
Maybe a pro could research the TLER feature and confirm how bad it really is, as I haven't seen anyone scratch the surface of this subject on TPU.

 

[slyfox2151]

killing the drive? i cant see that happening.... i can see it causing the controller to state the array has failed.. but a reboot and scan of the array will show there is nothing wrong with it.


i also cant tell if it affects Raid0 or not... as i have said im running 2 WD Green drives in Raid0 for the last 16 months or so, with the TLER problem. they have not once had a single fault.



Note: this is on the Intel ICH10R chipset. from the comments i have read about TLER is seems the problem always occers when they are running a Hardware Raid card, not software/chipset based.

 

[scaminatrix]

From what I've read, it's only the newer drives that are experiencing it. Apparently, TLER feature can be turned off in the older WDC's, but it is locked "on" in the newer drives.
Something about RAID specs needing an 8ms error recovery time and TLER only allowing 7ms.

Adobe forums have got a lot of information (as there are people there who use 3+, 5+, 15+ drive arrays) and the general consensus over there is that it doesn't matter whether it's on a HW RAID or SW/chipset based; failure rates are much higher than the other market leaders, and to stay away from the new WDCBlk's if planning on RAID.

And, even without the RAID associated problems, new WDC drives have a shockingly high failure rate on their own (this has been mentioned a couple of times on TPU) - another reason why I'm leaving the WDC camp and going Samsung (see specs, all my drives are WDCBlk's - 3 have failed within the last 15 months and I'm not even running RAID)!

As I said, the subject needs some deeeep research.