Intentional confusion, obfuscation, withholding of vital information... yes you could consider that lying. But to be honest all large companies are low on their ethics to see their profits grow. If you were a car broker and you had that hard-to-sell stupid car which nobody wanted for good reasons, and someone unknowning shows up with interest for the car; then what will you do? Will you be honest and say don't buy that one nobody buys it there's something better at my competitor next door?
Ethics and business are hard to combine. You can assume that you're being ripped off one way or another with most products, there's always some catch to it. IT products in particular use alot of psychological marketing to let the consumer think in such a way that it would prefer more expensive products, for bigger margins.
I even called WD twice just to see what they would say. And I was given two different stories. One said Caviar Blacks would work in RAID 0, 1, 0 + 1, and 1 + 0 or 10.
Well that is crap; not like the HDDs know in what kind of RAID they are being used. For all it knows it's a single disk with NTFS on it; HDDs are block-level storage devices they have no knowledge about what the HDD is being used for.
The question is, which RAID engine is going to handle your disk. If that's a software RAID engine under Linux/BSD which are written decently and won't detach drives performing recovery, then you're fine. If you attach this disk to a hardware RAID or windows driver/onboard RAID engine, then things will be different and the strict engine will detach disks that spend too long on recovery time. This varies from cheap onboard RAID (Intel, AMD, nVidia, VIA, Silicon Image) to expensive Hardware RAID cards like Areca ARC-1220. It is possible some hardware RAID is more tolerant towards desktop drives and let them perform recovery; but i've not seen any proof any product that actually falls into this category.
So for onboard RAID + hardware RAID you would need TLER disks, in whatever configuration you are running, to prevent them being dropped out of the RAID. Do note, that TLER increases BER or Bit-Error-Rate, which makes the likelihood of a bad/unreadable sector occurring much higher, since your disk will only be allowed 7 seconds to repair the damage; or FORFEIT its attempts. If you're running RAID0 then basically you're screwed since without TLER your disks will drop and with TLER bad sectors would cause corruption very quickly. Doh!
So if you want advanced RAID without having to buy TLER disks, the only solution is a non-Windows software RAID environment, like Linux or FreeBSD or OpenSolaris. ZFS is a great answer against BER and corruption, and is the most reliable method to store your data on multiple HDDs. If you want to stick to Windows-platform, then do not trust RAID too much and instead spend your money on a REAL backup solution; so another x drives that syncs every night with your main array, for example. And truly important data on a USB Stick as well; so it's stored three times.
I know nothing about ZFS, never heard of it until I read it here. Is it expensive? Can you explain it a little more, in layman's term? Thanks. I am definitely open to using something other than RAID.
ZFS is essentially an advanced new filesystem that integrated a volume manager or RAID engine. Nothing like it exists, and i would say it's a revolution in storage. But i'm a ZFS zealot; ZFS is not for everyone.
It only runs well on advanced UNIX operating systems, which are not really meant for desktop users but for system operators. However, some distributions exist that try to lower the threshold for people using ZFS. These projects include FreeNAS, NexentaCore and my own ZFSguru distribution. FreeNAS and ZFSguru might be the easiest to try. You can try either of them in a Virtualbox VM session, which works much like VMware except its opensource/free. So you could create a VM with 4 virtual disks and boot the livecd from FreeNAS or ZFSguru and access the web-interface, then create a ZFS pool and share it using Samba, then your Windows computer can access it and create a drive letter for it like X:\. To do that just enter "\\10.0.0.20" in address bar of an explorer window, without the " " characters. Change the IP to the server IP. This is calling 'mapping a network drive', you map that network address to a drive letter so you can easily access it.
FreeNAS can be found on www.freenas.org
ZFSguru doesn't have a real website yet; you can use the main thread on HardOCP forums for download link and more information:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1521803
If you want to try my dist, then you would want to download ZFSguru-0.1.7-preview2.iso and then update to preview2c version via the web-update.
Perhaps i'm telling too much; it shouldn't be too difficult to try this out and do basic things like creating a software pool (RAID5 or whatever) and sharing it across the network.
ZFS needs a decent amount of RAM; a real ZFS server should have no less than 4GiB RAM and best is 8GiB+, for performance reasons. But you can save money on not needing TLER disks, normal consumer disks do fine. You also don't need a hardware RAID controller with BBU (battery backup), so that saves money too. You can mix onboard ports and ports on add-on controller; but it should not be a RAID controller! Good 8-port HBA (=normal controller) would be Intel SASUC8i, SuperMicro USAS-L8i is another consideration; i use two of them. They sell for around $100-160, are PCI-express x8 and work great with ZFS.
If you want to explore more about ZFS, the thread i linked to another threads in that forum might provide alot of information, and i can assist you as well with questions you may have. But you do have to consider that the downside of going the ZFS route is that you would need to spend time on getting to know this and make this work for you. You will get reliable storage and potentially lower hardware costs in return, though.
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