On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 10:11 PM, Jim Schatzman <James.Schatzman@xxxxxxxxx> 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 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. 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 -- Tobias McNulty, Managing Member Caktus Consulting Group, LLC http://www.caktusgroup.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
