Consumer Grade WD Drives and Hardware RAID Controllers?

[Lucas]

My Video library has been increasing in size steadily and at first I used a NAS Server with a Hardware RAID controller with 300Gb drives. I noticed then that occasionally a drive would drop out of the Raid 5 array necessitating a rebuild. It was always one of the WD drives in the array. The drives were not faulty.

When the cost/size ratio for 1.5TB drives dropped, I sidelined the NAS server and used 1.5 TB drives in the SageTV Server with external 1.5 TB drives for backup.

Now that the library is increasing in size I am once again toying with RAID 5. By chance I found that in most of its desktop drives, WD has embeded code which causes the drive to pause while doing error recovery (TLER) thus causing the RAID controller to drop the drive.....

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/...ARS/td-p/19308

This explained my older experience with WD drives.

Luckilly most of my 1.5 TB terrabyte drives that I intend to use with RAID 5 are Seagate. A 3ware 9500S-12port RAID controller is on the way so I will be going with RAID 5 + hot spare. Given my current motherboard, I could not go with later PCI-e controllers and RAID6.

My question is for those of you who are using a RAID controller, how is you experience with WD drives? Also what is your experience with drives from Seagate, Samsung etc....

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[rtengvad]

Hi

My raid 5 seems to work fine. I've had only one event in early February where I had a degraded disk that initiatet a rebuild.

Im using an Adaptec 5405 PCI-E and 4 1 TB GP WD1000FYPS

Rasmus

[davephan]

I haven't had trouble with drive dropping out of the RAID 1 arrays. I have 10 drive in 5 RAID 1 pairs. It would be nice to have a RAID controller that would do RAID 6. RAID 5 is a bit too risky for me. It takes a long time to rebuild the drive set if you have a failure. If you have a second failure before the rebuild is done, all your data is gone.

The RAID controllers that do RAID 6 all seem to be very expensive. I am using two RAID controllers that are built onto the system board. One controller has 2 RAID 1 pairs, four drives capacity. The other controller has 3 RAID 1 pairs, 6 drives capacity. My only choices are RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. RAID 10 would balance out the load better, but if you are unlucky and have two drives in the same pair fail, all your data is gone.

Eventually, you'll probably have to upgrade to a system board with PCI-e, so it might be better to do that and order the PCI-e RAID controller instead.

Dave