1.5 TB drives in RAID

enewmen

Distinguished
Mar 6, 2005
2,247
3
19,815
Guys.

I'm looking to get a set of 1.5 TB drives in RAID5.
I notice some drives, like the WD Green drives will do poorly in RAID and break quickly (for many reasons)
Are there any reliable 1.5 TB drives that will do well in a RAID5 configuration?
Or is my only option to get 1 TB drives now or wait for the 1.5 TB drives to mature?
I don't care about speed, just reliability.
I've meen looking mainly at WD and Segate without much luck.

Ok thanks!
(I did search the web already).
 

Pointertovoid

Distinguished
Dec 31, 2008
327
0
18,810
Sorry it's not your question, but remember to check whether your OS uses Ept-type partitions, not Mbr-type, if you plan to exceed 2TB.

Reliability: Raid is nice for being automatic, but then your drives are in the same box at the same power supply, so you can lose them at the same time. Separate backup disks are more secure.

I've a broken WD under my eyes right now, which isn't of course a statistics... Have you already checked the number of failures of individual Hdd models, which is a more important factor than Raid ability?
 

enewmen

Distinguished
Mar 6, 2005
2,247
3
19,815


Thanks for the response. I'm not booting off the large partitions in Vista, not a problem. I also have external storage, not a problem.

The low power features of the drives make the R/W heads set very often, and within months the drive could be past the limit of load/unload cycles and start showing as old to SMART monitoring tools.
If I set up to use SMART monitoring, I should keep an eye on your load cycles and I may see them rise ridiculously fast, especially in RAID environments.

There was a tool, wdidle that allowed you to tweak the amount of idle time before the drives set the head. Using it essentially cuts down on the load/unload cycles by not unloading in as short an idle time as they are made to do, undoing some of the green power technology's savings.

I make any sense? Or I should not worry so much and just use TLER?
 

sub mesa

Distinguished
Stop using onboard/driver RAID in combination with RAID5. Stick to RAID0, RAID1 and combinations of those. Disk failure is not the most common type of failure for an onboard RAID5 array.

Your issue may not be with the disks themselves at all. Though you can test it, if you are willing to wipe the current RAID config.