Tue 4 Jun 2013
Status update!!!
Posted by suzaku under Releases
[6] Comments
2 Western Digital Black 2TB drives have been ordered and should be arriving some time this week.
Many thanks to those who have donated so far to this project! =^-^=
However…
I will be keeping the donation channels open for the following reasons.
About 6 and 1/2 years ago, I built a mega powered encoding system. This system I have upgraded a few times already, She’s based on an Phenom II X4 965 ( all my systems have anime names.) You may have seen her online as Misamisa.
anyway
when I built her, I spent ( Prices then ) $100 each for four 400 GB drives, out of which i buit a RAID 5 array on this array is mostly L-E data. ( hardware card ) with this in addition to the other 2 system drives in it, it has worked well for all this time..
Now 6+ years is a LONG time for dives to last, and so far there has been no failure… but sooner or later there WILL be…
and this is where the SUCK FACTOR comes in, Due to a dirty trick done by both Seagate and Westerdigital about 4 years ago, NORMAL drives will no longer work in RAID systems ( ie 5,6 any advanced RAID ) a new more expensive class of drive was created and the norm desktop drives were deliberately made to fail in such a setup ( Google TLER )
Now, because I know sooner or later one of the drives in the RAID will fail, I bought a RAID level 500gb WD drive and its sitting on a shelf safe and sound.
But sooner or later all drives should be replaced.. that is why I’m leaving this donation thing open.
I’m not directly asking for anything, I’m just stating how things are at the moment.. and saying If you want to donate.. people can.
This is how things stand..
There is about $45 left.
For 4 new RAID compatible drives..
$359.96 for Western Digital WD RE4 WD5003ABYX 500GB which will be close to what I had.
OR.
$439.96 for Western Digital WD RE4 WD1003FBYX 1TB which would be 2x the old array.
Regardless of anything.. I will be adding what I can to this total over time.
Again, Thanks to those who have donated.
Suzaku and the Staff of Live-eviL
Then why do I have 6 Hitachi 2tb desk-stars in a raid 5, working perfectly…..
Or am I misreading something
It is your choice to use… “death-stars” in your set up…
BUT.
I have looked into this quite a bit.
——-
From the maker of My raid controller,
When I asked them directly if normal desktop drives would work.
Dear customer,
These disks are OK but not for RAID application. For RAID applications, we recommend to use enterprise series hard disks. Use of any non enterprise series hard drive are no t guaranteed to work and will not be supported.
—-
THUS…
they must be replaced only with enterprise series..
The RAID “company” is expecting you to have 24/7 High Volume data transfer. but again I do understand wanting to follow what the manufacture recommends.
But at that Point you should buy 15k SAS drives.
–
I know your not attacking my drives, but I feel I must defend them.
I Have had more luck with Hitachi/Toshiba Drives. and only two out of 71~ish drives have failed me.
–
But good luck on your build and all the trouble shooting that involves.
Nice looking drives. 🙂
BTW, I’ll donate more money to “the cause” in the future, when I can. ^_~
From what I’ve read on hardware RAID _cards_, you either go holy sh** expensive with nice on-card cache and builtin battery backup or else it has near zero advantage over just going software RAID. (I ended up with a 5-bay hotswappable Linux software RAID)
Ugh, now my head hurts from googling and reading on TLER etc. , so:
– if you hook up non-TLER disks to a hardware RAID controller that expects TLER, it gets all panicky in problem situations because the disk doesn’t react fast enough to its liking
– if you hook up TLER disks to something else, including windows(?)/linux software RAID, NASes (most of which apparently use software RAID and ignore TLER), the disk gives up sooner than it needs to, potentially leading to not recovering recoverable data…
(I guess I’ll need to check my disks and make sure I _disable_ TLER for any that have it enabled)
– if you hook up 4 brand new disks to a 6+ year old RAID controller, I wouldn’t be surprised if the controller would be kind of a bottleneck and you’d get more speed out of windows/linux software RAID…
PS: from the googling, WD Red seems to be the cheap TLER-enabled option.
“WD Red is the only hard drive designed for NAS systems that have 1-5 drive bays. The drives are designed and extensively tested for compatibility in the unique 24×7 operating environment and demanding system requirements of home and small office NAS.” EUR 70 for the 1TB version ($80-85 on US sites it seems), EUR 102.50 for the 2TB on the site I copy-pasted that off…
PS#2: I still have a 40 Gbyte IDE drive in 1 PC and a 250 Gbyte IDE drive in the other as boot/main drive.
In my experience, harddrives either die within the first 2 years or last for 10+ years. 😉
Why not go with WD Red drives? They are cheaper (3TB for $130US-ish), runs cooler than WD Black, and support TLER.