2TB 'green' drives

[mjs_mjs]

I'm thinking about getting 4 WD 2TB green drives for my newest server. They will be in software RAID 5, and not hosting the OS or virtual memory. Win server 2003 as the OS and i'll make them dynamic as u have to to use windows RAID.

 

My question is are the drives any good? The performance mentioned here http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/31905-2tb-hdd.html#post300527 is good. And they'll basically be host virtual HD images for virtual servers and storage for my files, and some for my family. (They get 100GB or so, i get the rest... yes i need this space, and yes it has to be 4 drives.

 

also on a side note - can i get them anywhere cheaper than £160 inc vat each?

 

cheers

Edited October 18, 2009 by mjs_mjs

[Michael]

If you're going to spend some money on high end disk drives, I would recommend hardware RAID. You will get much better performance even with cheaper cards.

[Michael]

I forgot to say, the lowest I could find was £140 inc VAT. Google is your friend

[Dos_Box]

I have one of the 2TB Green drives in my media PC, and it performs OK for media tasks. Very silent

They have just released the 2 TB 'Black' drives which are more performance orientated:

 

WD Caviar Black 2TB ? Register Hardware

[Arthur]

I have a 2TB WD Caviar Green (WD20EADS) in my Windows Home Server and it's been great so far. However, for what you are doing wouldn't it be better to get the enterprise-class version (the RE4-GP) which is designed for use in RAID arrays? One important feature that this has compared to Western Digital's other 2TB drives is TLER.

[Arthur]

If you're going to spend some money on high end disk drives, I would recommend hardware RAID. You will get much better performance even with cheaper cards.

Not always.

[mjs_mjs]

I have one of the 2TB Green drives in my media PC, and it performs OK for media tasks. Very silent

They have just released the 2 TB 'Black' drives which are more performance orientated:

 

WD Caviar Black 2TB ? Register Hardware

 

Interestingly i've herd good things about the server disks that they are close to, i wonder if their actually the same hardware but different firmwares? The only reason i'm looking at the green and not the black series is that i dont strictly need performance - just the space and some resilance if a drive fails.

 

If you're going to spend some money on high end disk drives, I would recommend hardware RAID. You will get much better performance even with cheaper cards.

 

I wouldn't say these were high end at all, quite the opposite. I only need IDE performance, and i think i will get that with these drives with software RAID. Only reason for going software RAID is it's cheaper. Agreed sinking 160/140 (thanks for that) on a drive for paritity is steep for a home server, but with hardware RAID it would be that and a card, and what happens if the card goes and i cant get an identical - i'm screwed, with software i just pulg in another 2TB drive to any port, and rebuild away. The OS is on a RAID 1 array (hardware RAID and i'm currently looking into testing what would happen if i remove the card). But i'll be keeping regular backups (<90days apart to avoid tombstoning). But not of the 6TB of data. I dont have enough $$$ for that.

 

OS is sitting on 2 blue drive 500 GB each on a startec RAID controller. I'll be testing the performance soon.

[mjs_mjs]

If you're going to spend some money on high end disk drives, I would recommend hardware RAID. You will get much better performance even with cheaper cards.

 

Some of the cheaper cards offload to the processor anyway (or so i've herd) which makes them almost software RAID anyway.

[mac_shinobi]

not sure if its of any use to you but when I was looking at hard drives they also did RAID versions of the same hard drives that had a slightly different serial number / firmware version that are meant to be a lot more reliable

[morganw]

I've got a 1TB WD Caviar Green, I definitely wouldn't use it in a RAID array as you wouldn't want different parts of the array spinning at different speeds (I think rotation speed depends on head position and can vary by a few thousand rpm). It also spins down a lot.

[Arthur]

As morganw and mac_shinobi mentioned above, you should get HDDs designed for RAID. Not for performance reasons, but reliability. The last thing you want is the drive spinning down or the firmware spending too long trying to read a bad sector (instead of skipping it) and then being dropped from the array. However, if you do get the standard Caviar Green drives then it's worth searching for the WDTLER.exe utility to enable this feature on the drives.