On 10/28/2012 12:47 PM, Ed W wrote:
- Green consumer drives likely are satisfactorarily reliable for most uses, caveat that you accept they will fail catastrophically eventually (just like your enterprise drive will). We can debate the relative life of each, but it's almost certainly just a linear factor...
Our experience is that they aren't acceptable for RAIDs in most cases, unless you turn on TLER, and turn off the green functions at minimum. In which case, what advantage do they have other than price?
Part of the issue is them falling out of RAIDs. Part of the the issue are the occasional hiccups on coming out of sleep mode, which for most desktops isn't a problem, but DEFINITELY an issue for RAIDs.
Another (sometimes significant) issue is that we've been noticing partial coverage (e.g. missing functions) in some of the pages available to sdparm with the desktop/consumer drives. This is very annoying, especially if you are building a RAID. Most egregious on SSDs, but we've seen one spinning rust device that did the same.
There's not a huge difference in pricing between the two types, and your time is valuable. I'd argue for the lower time cost as part of a longer term lower TCO. We've built systems with both types of drives, but based upon the experiences with desktop/consumer drives, we'd have to advise avoiding this route if possible. The upfront money you might save will be spent more than likely on your time/efforts to repair hiccups in the system later.
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