Suitable HDD for 24x7 HD vid multi-stream RAID array

[TeraMedia]

I am looking to acquire a set of HDDs to make into a few RAID 5 arrays running on different systems, as well as a handful of backup drives and local data drives. I want interchangeable drives for a variety of reasons, so no "model X" for this and "model Y" for that, unless to do otherwise just isn't possible.

Criteria:
- suitable for 24x7 use
- reliability
- 7200 RPM. No less, no more. No green drives.
- minimum 3 year warranty; this ties in to reliability
- compatible with ICH7R/8R/9R/10R etc. running in RAID 0, 1, or 5 mode, or in AHCI mode
- compatible with AHCI, running as a basic disk and as a Windows RAID 5 dynamic disk
- compatible with AMD SB850, SB950 running in RAID 0, 1, or 5 mode, or in AHCI mode
- compatible with SiI 3114 add-on SATA controller running in both AHCI and RAID mode
- compatible with a typical 8-port HW RAID card running in RAID 5 or 6
- price

I have several WD Raid Edition drives and they seem to work ok, but I don't have any insight into how well other vendors' drives will work in RAID configurations with any particular controller or RAID card. The TLER feature does not seem to have added or taken away anything as far as stability and reliability are concerned.

So my question is, given the above criteria and intended uses, which of the drives below would you recommend? Are there any which you would recommend against? If so, why?

 

[tomatthe]

You can mark out the two WD black drives, those will not work reliably in a raid 5 set. Not a lot of help, but pulls a few options off your list.

 

[foscooter]

For your use, you need "RE" rated drives.

Samsung made some, and WD has them.

 

[jaguarskx]

I like Western Digital RE drives. They are not that much more than the Blacks. Well at least the 1TB RE drives are really not that much more expensive. With a 1.2m hour MTBF I figure I can use them in my PCs for 7 year under normal usage (i.e. no RAID setup) before worrying about replacing them. After that I would simply destroy the hard drives to ensure whatever data on the drives will not be recoverable.

 

[TeraMedia]

Anyone try a non-RE WD (or other) drive and have it not work in a RAID array? I've been running a pair of WD cav blacks in a RAID 1 / RAID 0 matrix-like array (on AMD SB850 chipset ports), and it's been fine now for almost 3 years. Did I hit the lottery, or is there more to the TLER story? Is it a controller issue - e.g. chipset / SW controllers OK, HW add-in controllers not OK?

The RE4s are indeed expensive. And I have had ok-but-not-outstanding experiences with them. I started with 4 x 400 GB in 2005, and those have all failed after a x-country move and running 24x7 in a hot HTPC case, just after the warranty expired, which I *think* was 3 years. I then was running 4 x 500 GB (WD5000YS) and those ran inside the same hot case for over 5 years. Two of those have failed also, but those two went through the x-country move, humidity changes, temp changes, and system swaps so I forgive them. The other two are still running strong, and are working with two WD5002xxYS drives that also run fine. I ran into a problem with Windows 7, SW and FW on an ICH7R SB trying to run matrix RAID 5 / RAID 0 where either of two of the drives would frequently fall out, but updates to both drive FW and system FW / SW fixed that.

Can anyone list a HDD other than WD REs that they've had good experience with in a chipset or controller card (HW) RAID array?

Also, can someone please tell me if my poll is still open? My view says "This poll is closed, you cannot vote," even though it's supposed to be open for another month (?)

 

[tomatthe]

The non-re drives will work fine in raid 0/1 just not in sets that use parity such as raid 5 and 6.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I couldn't find the complete specs on these so I don't know if they are 7200rpm drives, but have you looked into A/V drives that are made for 24/7 use?

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/av/

 

[FireWire2]

I am looking to acquire a set of HDDs to make into a few RAID 5 arrays running on different systems, as well as a handful of backup drives and local data drives. I want interchangeable drives for a variety of reasons, so no "model X" for this and "model Y" for that, unless to do otherwise just isn't possible.

Criteria:
- suitable for 24x7 use
- reliability
- 7200 RPM. No less, no more. No green drives.
- minimum 3 year warranty; this ties in to reliability
- compatible with ICH7R/8R/9R/10R etc. running in RAID 0, 1, or 5 mode, or in AHCI mode
- compatible with AHCI, running as a basic disk and as a Windows RAID 5 dynamic disk
- compatible with AMD SB850, SB950 running in RAID 0, 1, or 5 mode, or in AHCI mode
- compatible with SiI 3114 add-on SATA controller running in both AHCI and RAID mode
- compatible with a typical 8-port HW RAID card running in RAID 5 or 6
- price

I have several WD Raid Edition drives and they seem to work ok, but I don't have any insight into how well other vendors' drives will work in RAID configurations with any particular controller or RAID card. The TLER feature does not seem to have added or taken away anything as far as stability and reliability are concerned.

So my question is, given the above criteria and intended uses, which of the drives below would you recommend? Are there any which you would recommend against? If so, why?

Why not GREEN drives? ANY HDD will failed soon or later. If you use software raid, that is a NO, NO...

Look at my 40TB Media Server it runs about 2yr+ replace 2x HDD so far
http://www.mpcclub.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22898&page=4

I have one HDD as extra inventory... keep it as peace of mind.

 

[TeraMedia]

I couldn't find the complete specs on these so I don't know if they are 7200rpm drives, but have you looked into A/V drives that are made for 24/7 use?

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/av/

Eventually, as these drives are going to be reassigned for other purposes (e.g. system backups, etc.), I'm not keen on the AV or AVGP models. I'd prefer general-use drives, unless AV drives have some benefit that other drives lack?

 

[TeraMedia]

Why not GREEN drives? ANY HDD will failed soon or later. If you use software raid, that is a NO, NO...

Why not green drives, you ask? No better reason than just a theory and a suspicion really. I have a bunch of those right now. Sometimes while watching a high-def movie (e.g. 1080p with Dolby TrueHD and deep color), I get this really annoying delay where the video freezes, the sound pauses, then the sound continues, and then all of a sudden the video goes hyper-fast until it catches up to the sound. I haven't been able to isolate the cause, but I do know that pausing, backing up and replaying that section again does not reproduce the problem.

On a different note, I'd just as soon have the additional performance and throughput, since these drives will be in an enclosure with decent ventilation and power availability. Noise is also not a primary concern.

Also, why is SW Raid a bad idea? Specifically, either the O/S RAID 5 that you can do with Windows 7 and Windows Home Server 2011, or the semi-SW RAID 5 that you can do with Intel ICH7R and later, and AMD SB850 and later chipsets?

 

[TeraMedia]

After looking at the HDD compatibility sheet from one of the RAID card vendors (Adaptec, Areca, Highpoint, LSI, Intel - I don't remember which), I'm going with the WD RE4 2TB WD2003FYYS drives. The HDD sheet I saw described longevity and compatibilty issues with drives from several vendors, and the RE series drives received the most "OK"s in aggregate, across several generations. The very early WD5000YS drives did require a FW update, but I actually happen to have those and even did the update so I know what they're talking about. Some vendors' "Enterprise" drives didn't even get OKs in the extended-test column.

 

[FireWire2]

Quirky playing mode - normally cause by the player did not get the data in the the buffer pool fast enough.

Here is what you can test.

Using IOMeter measure the 100% random read from the drive the hold your media files.
If the speed is over 10MB/s, there is nothing wrong the the share volume.
Otherwise trouble shoot your network change protocol parameters of SMB:

kern.ipc.maxsockbuf
net.inet.tcp.recvspace
net.inet.tcp.sendspace

or use NFS protocol instead

Keep in mind BD.ISO MAX bit rate is 60Mb/s

Don't get me wrong, if you have and want to use RE HDD - I'm all for it...

But there is an alternative lower cost and same reliable for home server

Here is why I'm not quiet comfort with SW Raid.

BTW there is NO SW raid5 in Windows7 or WHS

MB's BIOS raid5 performs OK with 3~4 drives the more drives you add the slower it gets.
what I find out (accidentally), the amount of IRQ send from each drive to the CPU is overwhelming. The slice of time dedicate to RAID is not enough the handle it, therefore everything slows down...
But you look at the CPU's recourse. It is 10% max ( nothing else is runing just read and write data to SW RAID

This is why SW RAID5 is not for performance and reliable!

 

[Emerald]

WD cav blacks manufacturer before 10/10 do have TLER support

I used the Seagate ES for the last 5 years

to be on the save side I would stick with either WD RE4 or Seagate ES

 

[TeraMedia]

Quirky playing mode - normally cause by the player did not get the data in the the buffer pool fast enough.

Here is what you can test.

Using IOMeter measure the 100% random read from the drive the hold your media files.
If the speed is over 10MB/s, there is nothing wrong the the share volume.
Otherwise trouble shoot your network change protocol parameters of SMB:

kern.ipc.maxsockbuf
net.inet.tcp.recvspace
net.inet.tcp.sendspace

or use NFS protocol instead

Keep in mind BD.ISO MAX bit rate is 60Mb/s

Thanks for the tip! I'm trying IO Meter now. Never used IO Meter before, so we'll see what it finds.

BTW there is NO SW raid5 in Windows7 or WHS

My WHS 2011 is running with an O/S-managed RAID 5 array right now? And Windows 7 Ultimate also supports RAID 5 arrays in SW directly, built from just simple JBODs. I don't think you can boot from them, nor would you want to, but the feature's there. It wasn't there in WHS v1, nor in various other flavors of Win 7. It works ok, but it's missing a lot of the admin-oriented features that you'd want in a RAID controller. But on the flip side, it is eminently portable - any other Windows O/S that supports RAID 5 can read the array. THG did a writeup about this maybe 4 years ago.

MB's BIOS raid5 performs OK with 3~4 drives the more drives you add the slower it gets.
what I find out (accidentally), the amount of IRQ send from each drive to the CPU is overwhelming. The slice of time dedicate to RAID is not enough the handle it, therefore everything slows down...
But you look at the CPU's recourse. It is 10% max ( nothing else is runing just read and write data to SW RAID

This is why SW RAID5 is not for performance and reliable!

I honestly couldn't say; I suppose it depends on your system's configuration. If your drives were somehow connecting in PIO mode, then I could see that crushing your system with IRQs. But I have a 4-way RAID 5 array built with 500 GB REs that's been running literally non-stop since 2007 except SW upgrades and maintenance, and that's on an old Pentium D with ICH7R SB for the RAID "controller", and I get better than 90 MB/s transfer rates from that array out of its GbE port. As for reliability, that indeed is a problem because a system crash will necessitate a rebuild.

I also have a 4-way RAID 5 array built with WD 1.5 TB Green drives that's been running since 2009 on an AMD SB850 controller. That's the array with the HD video folders on it, and that's the one I'm not happy with.

 

[FireWire2]

My WHS 2011 is running with an O/S-managed RAID 5 array right now? And Windows 7 Ultimate also supports RAID 5 arrays in SW directly, built from just simple JBODs

Are you sure? I know the RAID5 option is grey out in Window7 OS.
Here is the link of the raid5 is grey out http://www.overclockers.com/setting-up-os-raid-with-windows-7-ultimate/

4x spindle RAID5 @ 90MB/sec is too slow - you should get about 200MB/s

I have been using lots of MB's BIOS RAID5, never happy with it. After I found the SPM394 controller that is...
no more BIOS Raid

I can now stream multiple places without a problem.., I test RANDDOM read from 5x drives connected to SPM394 @ 39MB/sec

It means, I can have six BD.ISO streaming at once


Check it out

 

[TeraMedia]

@FireWire2:
O/S Controlled RAID 5: I'm sure my WHS 2011 is running an O/S-controlled RAID 5 array. If I could attach a screen shot, I would. As for Win 7, I'll have to setup a VM to look into that. I can see that the option's disabled, but I thought that was just because I didn't have enough unused disk drives available. IIRC, on O/S versions where it isn't available, the option doesn't even appear. Now you've piqued my curiosity.

90 MB/s is just fine when it's being run over Gb ethernet. GbE tops out at a theoretical ~125 MB/s raw, and it's normal to get less than that when round-trip traffic is involved.

SPM394: Interesting piece of HW. That might prove useful for what I'm doing.

Back to IO Meter: I'm getting 166-170 MB/s out of those 4-way RAID 5 WD 1.5 TB green drives running on the AMD SB850. IOPS is just under 40, which is probably constrained by the size of each request in this case (4M * 40 = 160 MB/s). CPU is 4.27%. Avg IO Response time is 25 ms, and Max IO Response time is 342 ms. Could that last number be why I'm getting stuttering with HD video? I'm wondering if its possibly fragmentation or error re-tries. Insight is appreciated.

 

[FireWire2]

@FireWire2:
O/S Controlled RAID 5: I'm sure my WHS 2011 is running an O/S-controlled RAID 5 array. If I could attach a screen shot, I would. As for Win 7, I'll have to setup a VM to look into that. I can see that the option's disabled, but I thought that was just because I didn't have enough unused disk drives available. IIRC, on O/S versions where it isn't available, the option doesn't even appear. Now you've piqued my curiosity.

90 MB/s is just fine when it's being run over Gb ethernet. GbE tops out at a theoretical ~125 MB/s raw, and it's normal to get less than that when round-trip traffic is involved.

SPM394: Interesting piece of HW. That might prove useful for what I'm doing.

Back to IO Meter: I'm getting 166-170 MB/s out of those 4-way RAID 5 WD 1.5 TB green drives running on the AMD SB850. IOPS is just under 40, which is probably constrained by the size of each request in this case (4M * 40 = 160 MB/s). CPU is 4.27%. Avg IO Response time is 25 ms, and Max IO Response time is 342 ms. Could that last number be why I'm getting stuttering with HD video? I'm wondering if its possibly fragmentation or error re-tries. Insight is appreciated.

WHS2011 supports SW RAID5, but not WIn7 - that I know for sure

Most HDD test is sequential read/write, which DOES NOT reflect the actual usage. The close to real-life test is 100% Random read/Write.

This may require a little tweak in test set up of IOMeter.

Avg IO Response time is 25 ms, and Max IO Response time is 342 ms

this is what I'm refer to in earlier post...
CPU time is divide among the tasks and RAID driver software get a portion of CPU time. there is not enough time...

Note: One thing we need to understand:
IDE/SATA is NOT SCSI. therefore it does not have SCSI character that has low IRQ send to CPU

Try SPM394 you will see the different - I'm talking night and day

 

[TeraMedia]

WHS2011 supports SW RAID5, but not WIn7 - that I know for sure

Learned something new. MSFT indeed took the cheesy route and merely grayed-out the RAID-5 feature rather than removing it from the list. Not only that, but their OLH talks about Vista and Win 2008 instead of Win 7 in some places. Oh well.

So, it looks like I'm not going to be using O/S-controlled RAID-5 in Win 7. That SPM 394 looks interesting, but I don't have enough spare 5 1/4 spaces for what I'm trying to do. Thanks for your insight regardless, especially the IO Meter.

 

[FireWire2]

You can use 5x drives in 3x 5.25 open space to hold five drives or 4x in 3