From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Tobias McNulty Subject: Re: HBA Adaptor advice Date: Sun, 22 May 2011 23:39:50 -0400 Message-ID: References: <20110523021234.1BAEAF9C03C@mail.fulab.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20110523021234.1BAEAF9C03C@mail.fulab.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Jim Schatzman Cc: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 10:11 PM, Jim Schatzman wrote: > 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 mo= nths of operation (about equal fractions of Green and Enterprise). Over= all, 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 (a= n Enterprise drive). That drive was a warranty replacement for an earli= er 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= =2E It appears that quality has improved. I never lost any data nor eve= r had to restore from backup because I was always able to replace the b= ad drive and rebuild the raid without difficulty that I could not get s= olved through this forum. > > My experience suggests that the WD Enterprise class drives were an un= necessary expense, at least as far as reliability is concerned. > > Would I recommend cheap SATA drives for mission critical data? =A0Abs= olutely not. I wouldn't recommend =A0any =A0SATA drives. Go with the mo= st =A0expensive SAS drives available. For that matter, I have loads of = SCSI drives that are still going fine after 5 to 10 years of 365x24x7 o= peration. > > 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 sm= art checks often. Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, make certai= n that everything attached to the RAID is plugged into a high quality U= PS. Otherwise, you are just asking for a power spike to take out multip= le drives and/or the controller and to lose data. One odd statistical fluke regarding quality control on the large Green drives: I ordered 3 of the drives on Amazon and 3 on Newegg, and all 3 of the Newegg drives failed very quickly (within a couple weeks), while all 3 of the Amazon drives are still going strong (5 months old and on 24/7). I'm not sure if it was a packaging issue or an issue with that particular set of drives that Newegg had in stock, but it left me wondering. Tobias --=20 Tobias McNulty, Managing Member Caktus Consulting Group, LLC http://www.caktusgroup.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" i= n the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html