From: Jim Schatzman <James.Schatzman@fulab.com>
To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: HBA Adaptor advice
Date: Sun, 22 May 2011 20:11:54 -0600 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20110523021234.1BAEAF9C03C@mail.fulab.com> (raw)
One more input re. using cheap drives.
I have been running about 20 Western Digital "Green" and "Enterprise" drives (half are 1.5 TB and half are 2 TB) for several years in Raid-5 and Raid-6 configurations (all linux md). They are up 24x7. When they first came on the market, about 30% of my new drives failed within 3 months of operation (about equal fractions of Green and Enterprise). Overall, 50% of the drives eventually failed - 35% of the Green drives and 100% of the Enterprise drives. In the past 18 months, one has failed (an Enterprise drive). That drive was a warranty replacement for an earlier Enterprise drive failure.
My impression is that Western was having some quality control issues with the 2GB drives - both Green and Enterprise. This was very annoying. It appears that quality has improved. I never lost any data nor ever had to restore from backup because I was always able to replace the bad drive and rebuild the raid without difficulty that I could not get solved through this forum.
My experience suggests that the WD Enterprise class drives were an unnecessary expense, at least as far as reliability is concerned.
Would I recommend cheap SATA drives for mission critical data? Absolutely not. I wouldn't recommend any SATA drives. Go with the most expensive SAS drives available. For that matter, I have loads of SCSI drives that are still going fine after 5 to 10 years of 365x24x7 operation.
If you are going to build a RAID from cheap drives, expect that part of your hardware savings will be compensated for by labor costs. Run smart checks often. Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, make certain that everything attached to the RAID is plugged into a high quality UPS. Otherwise, you are just asking for a power spike to take out multiple drives and/or the controller and to lose data.
Jim
next reply other threads:[~2011-05-23 2:11 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 60+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2011-05-23 2:11 Jim Schatzman [this message]
2011-05-23 3:39 ` HBA Adaptor advice Tobias McNulty
2011-05-23 10:42 ` Ed W
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2011-05-23 11:14 HBA Adaptor Advice Ed W
2011-05-23 11:55 ` Joe Landman
2011-05-19 12:26 HBA Adaptor advice Ed W
2011-05-19 12:36 ` Roman Mamedov
2011-05-19 12:43 ` Mathias Burén
2011-05-19 14:06 ` Michael Sallaway
2011-05-19 19:10 ` Thomas Harold
2011-05-19 21:12 ` Rudy Zijlstra
2011-05-19 21:07 ` Brad Campbell
2011-05-20 20:58 ` Tobias McNulty
2011-05-20 21:23 ` Brad Campbell
2011-05-20 2:08 ` Andy Smith
2011-05-20 5:30 ` Stan Hoeppner
2011-05-21 9:52 ` Ed W
2011-05-20 7:33 ` Ed W
2011-05-20 10:21 ` Stan Hoeppner
2011-05-21 11:17 ` Ed W
2011-05-21 11:29 ` Rudy Zijlstra
2011-05-21 11:54 ` Ed W
2011-05-21 17:37 ` Leslie Rhorer
2011-05-22 9:41 ` Stan Hoeppner
2011-05-22 10:03 ` Rudy Zijlstra
2011-05-23 9:32 ` Ed W
2011-05-21 17:05 ` Leslie Rhorer
2011-05-22 9:04 ` Stan Hoeppner
2011-05-22 10:09 ` Brad Campbell
2011-05-22 19:25 ` Stan Hoeppner
2011-05-22 20:57 ` Tobias McNulty
2011-05-22 21:13 ` Johannes Truschnigg
2011-05-23 9:48 ` Ed W
2011-05-23 10:44 ` John Robinson
2011-05-22 23:19 ` Brad Campbell
2011-05-23 4:09 ` Roman Mamedov
2011-05-23 5:54 ` Brad Campbell
2011-05-23 6:08 ` Roman Mamedov
2011-05-23 10:42 ` Stan Hoeppner
2011-05-23 11:35 ` David Brown
2011-05-23 6:54 ` Stan Hoeppner
2011-05-23 7:23 ` Brad Campbell
2011-05-22 23:44 ` Brad Campbell
2011-05-23 0:07 ` Brad Campbell
2011-05-23 5:30 ` Stefan /*St0fF*/ Hübner
2011-05-23 10:18 ` Ed W
2011-05-23 9:58 ` Stan Hoeppner
2011-05-23 10:33 ` Ed W
2011-05-23 11:21 ` Stan Hoeppner
2011-05-20 12:18 ` Joe Landman
2011-05-20 12:34 ` Roman Mamedov
2011-05-20 12:36 ` Mathias Burén
2011-05-20 12:48 ` Joe Landman
2011-05-20 13:21 ` Ed W
2011-05-20 14:23 ` Joe Landman
2011-05-20 20:01 ` Andy Smith
2011-05-20 20:12 ` Stan Hoeppner
2011-05-20 20:24 ` Drew
2011-05-20 20:58 ` Stan Hoeppner
[not found] ` <4DD7A100.2010807@wildgooses.com>
2011-05-22 8:13 ` Stan Hoeppner
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