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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Hitachi 3 TB 7200rpm drives - RAID results?

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Bruce Allen

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For all of us running out of disk space for RED projects...

Hitachi announced 3TB 7200rpm drives today:
http://www.storagereview.com/3tb_hitachi_deskstar_7k3000_quietly_released

The old Deskstar 2TB drives kinda rock - they are $100 and seem to like being RAIDed. Hitachi seems more friendly than Seagate and Western Digital about the idea making a RAID out of $100 drives instead of their $300 models, at least. I own 19 of the Hitachi 2TBs and haven't had a problem so far. That said, I have 10 Western Digital 2TB GreenPower drives and they worked in a RAID too... a bit slow though.

Anyway, I was wondering what results the folks with the latest RAID controllers get with these guys?

Probably I'll buy a new ATTO or Areca for them - I have a Highpoint RocketRaid 4000 series controller and a ProAVIO enclosure and it's worked well, plus a bunch of OWC 4-drive RAID5 systems - but it's time to start planning the next upgrade and ATTO and Areca seem a teensy bit better. Either that, or just write my script and delay the purchase until someone makes some kind of Light Peak ultra-RAID cheap system that leaves my PCI slots free for CUDA cards for DaVinci :)

Also, when are those 4TB drives coming? They're late...

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Caviar Black drives can be got for $130 for 2tb with 64mb cache, they work pretty damn fast in a raid. I'm getting between 500 and 600MB over 4 drives
 
The Caviar Black 64MB-cache 2TB are the best of the 2TB drives out there right now. Very, very reliable and they're a good 15% faster than the Hitachi units. I also recommend the RE4 series 2TB (about $85 more per drive) if you're going to RAID 4 or more of them. They have different timings and lower transaction time in and out limits, which gives a further boost for RAID setups. They're also nice and quiet.

I bought two 20-packs of RE4 2TB about 3 weeks ago. Just installed 4 of them into an '09 Mac Pro and have them running an 8TB software RAID-0. Very speedy. I'm getting over 330MB/s write and over 500MB/s read. System has a WD Black-X 64MB-cache 7200rpm 1TB as the OS/apps drive installed into the lower optical bay.

The Hitachi units are great too. So far also very solid here, just not quite up to the WDs in the performance department. I'm anxious to see how the 3TB units handle. I have one 3TB WD Caviar Green here for testing and it seems to be a nice drive, but it's 5400rpm variable. So far it's just in an external eSATA / FW800 enclosure and that seems to be a great use for it.

The ATTO and Areca controllers are definitely the way to go over the HighPoint. Not that HighPoint is bad... Areca seems to have the most flexible options at the moment.

On the Mac you really need an ATTO card if you want to connect an LTO tape. However, I would recommend doing that on a separate host from your primary RAID controller anyway and Areca RAID cards are Mac-bootable. you can re-mount the internal drives in their sleds so you can connect them to your add-in controller too. Lots of options with a Mac Pro if you're creative. If you go the PCIe expander route, don't put your performance RAID card in the expander... Just sayin'
 
Jeff gives very good advice here, it parallels my experience exactly.

One data point to add is that I've had a pretty poor experience with the WD green drives. Part of that might have been the base drive was a 1.5TB

In general for whatever reason the 1.5's seem to suck even across manufacturers. I've got some of the green 1 TB and while they had a high initial failure rate, after I got good drives they've been OK.

But for bigger raids you're best off with the RE series.

Central computer is local for me, and you can pick up the cavair blacks for about 135.00 on sale every couple of months.

Steve
 
I have been using the Adaptec controller. (5085 and 3085 before that) I have two complaints.

1. I have to install their software in order to manage the raid. Their software requires a password on the user account. This machine is not on a network and so I don't want a password. I had a 3ware that used a web browser to configure.
2. It takes a long time for the card to boot during post. It has to load its kernel which takes over 1-minute.

Does the Atto have to boot? What about array management? I was considering their 6G card.

I have all Seagates and I have to replace a drive from time-to-time. I really want to replace them. I have two 16 way enclosures. One is a RAID6 and the other a RAID5. This is all under Win7.
 
Hi Stacey,

No the cavair black is WD2001FASS and usually retails around 175.00

http://www.centralcomputers.com/com...ata2-64mb-7200rpb-wd2001fass-driwd-20003s.htm, and as I mentioned these guys put them on sale every couple of months.

I'll PM you if I see them on sale.

The WD2003FYYS is a better drive, it's the RE series and what I prefer to use, but they do cost more money, but I think I paid around 225.00 for mine in lots of 8.

The 3ware cards are quite good too. I've got a 9550 that still plugging away after at least six years, maybe more. I just added a new one to a windows server I use for medium term storage before I archive to tape. And I noticed that they have a mac driver for it:

http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/raid_controllers/3ware_9650se-16ml/index.html

I haven't tried it in a mac yet but it's been a long while since 3ware did a cross platform card, and it's less money.

The 3ware config options are the best of the bunch imo, for a lot of reasons, but one you specifically mention, the web interface is well thought out.

The atto has a cli so you could likely make that work, but the configuration utility is a stand alone exe. so it may not be as good a fit. That said it's faster and works on pretty much any OS really well.

At least some of the LSI, and most if not all of the areca's have a web config.

Cheers,

Steve
 
Bruce Allen said:
For all of us running out of disk space for RED projects...

..I own 19 of the Hitachi 2TBs and haven't had a problem so far. That said, I have 10 Western Digital 2TB GreenPower drives and they worked in a RAID too... a bit slow though.
www.boacinema.com
Click to expand...

whats your read and write speeds on both
your Hitachi raid and GreenPower drives?
 
Stephen Lovett said:
One data point to add is that I've had a pretty poor experience with the WD green drives. Part of that might have been the base drive was a 1.5TB
Click to expand...

I have no logical explanation for it, but no manufacturer, and I mean no one, has produced a reliable and properly performing 1.5TB hard drive. Period. End of discussion. I've replaced dozens of Seagate 1.5TB drives due to failures and several WD 1.5's as well. Not as many, but they arrived on the market later and didn't perform as well as the Seagates. 1.5TB HDD experience was so bad here that we pulled all of them from all systems / RAIDs / SAN nodes from the datacenter my IT company manages. I literally have boxes of them sitting here that I don't know what to do with. Probably going to ebay them anonymously or send them as Christmas gifts to people I don't like, instead of giving them coal...

WD Green series drives are typically good (except those crappy 1.5TB ones), but you don't buy Green for the performance -- they don't have it. Green is great for low power usage, external enclosures, etc..

But for bigger raids you're best off with the RE series.
Click to expand...

Most definitely. Same with the Hitachi drives -- if you're going with more than 4 drives (that seems to be the magic number), you'll want the Enterprise RAID Edition UltraStar units.

Central computer is local for me, and you can pick up the cavair blacks for about 135.00 on sale every couple of months.
Click to expand...

Hard drive pricing is a funny thing -- kinda like RAM pricing in a way. You just have to watch prices. Even when we buy quantities, which is what I usually do here, I don't save any money by doing so -- I don't buy enough. Price breaks kick in after buying several hundred or even palettes of 1000 units. Retailers can get their price breaks by buying mix and match quantities from distributors. The 20-packs from NewEgg and other vendors are usually the best deal going, but you have to call them to work the deal. Typical web prices have the 20-packs as more expensive than individual drives. When I bought all the 2TB RE4's a couple weeks back, ProVantage gave me the best deal... I think I paid about $229/drive after shipping. NewEgg currently has them listed as $269 each, which is too high -- they're $238 at Amazon I think, or they were the other day.

The regular Black-X version is $179 there, which is typical. But sometimes there's promos or instant discount coupons. You just have to keep a pulse on the market.
 
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