Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

[Acebmxer]

Ok Look for you guys opinions and suggestions on hard drives. I have 2 WD 1.5tb green hdds in raid0 as storage in my second computer. 1 off the drives is saying it has 3 bad sectors. Only noticed this when I installed linux on the OS hdd in the system. I moved all data off the storage drives before hand and then proceeded to try and reformat the hdd's in a linux partition instead of ntfs. Thats when I saw 1 drive showing 3 bad sectors. After formatting that drive single and then formatting both drives together decided to go back to windows. Reformatted the drives back to ntfs and putt all data back onto the drives thought all my problems were done. Now intel raid software saying there is a problem with the same drive and the volume is not accessible yet i can still see it get data.

So what drives work ok with raid? Looking on newegg I see these WD's here.

Does anyone know of other manufactures that support raid on hdd's?

I might just got with the WD blacks. The 750 blacks I have run great. I dont have money to spend at all but I need to replace and I want to replace this once. Suggestions?

Edit - the drives failing are 1 of 2 WD Green 1.5tb in raid0 with 1.43tb of data on them. Need to find replacement.

[wazza300]

Re: Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

I love Samsung f3 1tb and f4 2tb drives,from what I've read they work well in raid0 but I havn't raided them myself,idk if they are cheaper then the wd but here they are the cheapest,I think I've got 5 of these drives and all are working well

[profJim]

Re: Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

A web search using:
Samsung f3 1tb raid
should help answer the questions as to how they perform in a raid setup.
I think that the Newegg customer reviews rate the F3 drives higher than nearly all other drives.
FWIW, a recent Newegg customer review said that Seagate bought out the Samsung hard drive division.

My WD 640GB Caviar black drive is slightly faster than the WD 750 and WD1TB black drives.
For maximum performance with win7, definitely make sure that all partitions are 4K aligned. This shouldn't be an issue if you use win7 to format the drives.

I've never used a raid setup, but I think that any "green" hard drives that spin down to save energy would have time out problems in a raid setup.

[Acebmxer]

Re: Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

I think that any "green" hard drives that spin down to save energy would have time out problems in a raid setup.

I think this is what caused my problem.

I am not looking for any performance as this is just for storage of data. Thats why I went with the "green" WD drives.

I am just looking for a set of drives that will work with raid with out issues.

I will take a look at the samsung F3 drives.

Open to any other ideas.

[wazza300]

Re: Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

The non green f4 2tb samsungs are good too,as for f3 I was getting nearly 150mbps read/write on a single empty drive

Profjim,I hope seagate havnt bought them out,i had a seagate drive once and it was noisy as hell

[Acebmxer]

Re: Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

I had issues with seagate drives also. Trying to stay away from them.. I also had the IBM Deskstars that had issues.. had 4 of those and they all died 1 after another.

[profJim]

Re: Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

Deskstars?
Or were they Deathstars?

[profJim]

Re: Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

A web search using seagate buys samsung confirms it.
It looks like the Seagate purchase includes Samsung's Nand technology business.
One of the big questions is what happens when the existing Samsung made hard drives have sold out.

[nijel]

Re: Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

The question is why RAID0 for storage??? Don't you value your data?

[Acebmxer]

Re: Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

Why raid0? Because I want the storage of 2 or more drives with out the clutter of multiple drive letter of drives. The speed is nice plus. The 2 wd 1.5tb green drives will avg 120 MB/sec copying or writing a 1.25gb file to my main system. Which has the 2x wd 750 black in raid0.

Do i value the data? yes and no... just be a pain in the ass to redownload all apps.. Movies all on dvd now.

I have been thinking about just doing away with raid and just single drives. I am not sure.

[nijel]

Re: Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

Go RAID5 or something... It'll take one extra drive but you'll have some level of data protection.

[Acebmxer]

Re: Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

still leaves the question, what drives? right now I have about 1.43 tb of data. I could probably cut some of that down but thats where I am at. So I need something 1.5tb or 2tb. I would rather not downgrade to 1tb drives.

Maybe to raid1 with 2x 2tb drives?

I should have said this in the first post. Ill go back and edit it.

[profJim]

Re: Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

Many Newegg customer reviews need to be taken with a grain of salt, especially when it deals with motherboards and memory. What bothers me when it comes to hard drives is that it seems that most hdd brands with greater than 1TB capacity and/or the newer higher speed sata drives seem to have a much higher DOA or premature failure rate than the older sata drives.

I can understand this in years past when Newegg's packing left a lot to be desired. I've found that they're packing is much improved in the past 18 months, especially their improved packing of OEM hard drives. I've bought all my hard drives from Newegg and all were WD drives along with one Samsung. None of my seven or eight drives has had any problems during the past 4 - 5 years.

Just my 2 cents.

[nijel]

Re: Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

I don't have problems with 2x1.5 TB Samsung EcoGreen F3 in RAID1. They've survived a couple of power outages and the P67 SATA controller had no problems reconstructing the array and recovering all my data automatically in background. Here is the failure rate for some 2 TB drives:

- 1,4% : Samsung EcoGreen F3
- 1,6% : WD Caviar RE4-GP (WD2002FYPS)
- 2,6% : WD Caviar Green (WD20EARS)
- 3,0% : WD Caviar Black (WD2001FALS)
- 3,7% : Seagate Barracuda LP
- 3,7% : WD Caviar Green (WD20EADS)
- 5,7% : Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000

Read more here: Disques durs - Les taux de pannes des composants - HardWare.fr

[profJim]

Re: Hard Drives and opinions and suggestions.

Thanks for the link.
I was going to post that I've seen a French link in the past that I think includes most or all of Europe. I'm bookmarking your link for future reference.
The failure rates that you've posted are MUCH LOWER than the customer reviews on Newegg would indicate.
I think the Hitachi Deskstar is nicknamed the Deathstar.