Have 2 3tb Seagates, are they good raid drives?

[motella]

Hi, I just bout a Seagate 3tb HDD and am Waiting for my next one, but since ill be getting two of the same drives, can I and would it be a good idea to put them into raid ? ( to only use as storage, don't know if I want the win 8 os on it yet)

And if so what "number" ie. raid 0, 1 or whatever would you recommend. Also Ive heard that low rpm drives pose problems when used in raid but I'm pretty sure these can cope with it (its a 7200 rpm Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 64MB 3TB drive)

Many thanks in advance for advice and help

 

[ntscot]

I have four Seagate 3TB drives in an 8 bay QNAP running in RAID5. It has been running for about two years 24/7 now with no issues at all so far. I had bad experiences with Seagates in the past. I've noticed that Seagates get quite hot and I lost two drives within 3 months (could have bee a bad batch). It was a good thing I was using RAID1 at the time and didn't lose any data. Seagates were the only ones that had 3TB at 7200RPM at the time I purchased them. If WD had 3TB Caviar Blacks at the time, i would have gone for them without hesitation. I loved my mirrored 2TB Caviar Blacks.

Here are three options I can suggest:

Option 1
RAID0 - maximises your storage space but no redundancy (i.e. two 3TB drives in RAID 0 gives you 6TB of usable space). However, if you lose just one drive, you lose ALL 6TB! Not recommended for data storage.

Option 2
RAID1 - mirrored RAID. If you have two 3TB in mirror RAID, you will only end up with 3TB usable space. But you can lose 1 drive and still be okay. As soon as you lose one drive, just go and replace and initiate the RAID rebuild. You have the fun of figuring out how to setup the RAID as well as rebuilding the RAID.

Option 3
No RAID - just two individual drives. There's no point going to RAID0 if you don't need a single 6TB drive, just use them as two individual 3TB drives. There's No RAID hassles and if you lose one drive, you only lose data on that one drive.

If you don't care about losing the data, just use them as two individual drives. If you do care about data loss, go with RAID1 an learn about RAID.

Hope that helps.

 

[motella]

I have four Seagate 3TB drives in an 8 bay QNAP running in RAID5. It has been running for about two years 24/7 now with no issues at all so far. I had bad experiences with Seagates in the past. I've noticed that Seagates get quite hot and I lost two drives within 3 months (could have bee a bad batch). It was a good thing I was using RAID1 at the time and didn't lose any data. Seagates were the only ones that had 3TB at 7200RPM at the time I purchased them. If WD had 3TB Caviar Blacks at the time, i would have gone for them without hesitation. I loved my mirrored 2TB Caviar Blacks.

Here are three options I can suggest:

Option 1
RAID0 - maximises your storage space but no redundancy (i.e. two 3TB drives in RAID 0 gives you 6TB of usable space). However, if you lose just one drive, you lose ALL 6TB! Not recommended for data storage.

Option 2
RAID1 - mirrored RAID. If you have two 3TB in mirror RAID, you will only end up with 3TB usable space. But you can lose 1 drive and still be okay. As soon as you lose one drive, just go and replace and initiate the RAID rebuild. You have the fun of figuring out how to setup the RAID as well as rebuilding the RAID.

Option 3
No RAID - just two individual drives. There's no point going to RAID0 if you don't need a single 6TB drive, just use them as two individual 3TB drives. There's No RAID hassles and if you lose one drive, you only lose data on that one drive.

If you don't care about losing the data, just use them as two individual drives. If you do care about data loss, go with RAID1 an learn about RAID.

Hope that helps.

Simple and helpful, I cant thank you enough. Thanks m8. btw how do I choose your answer as the "best answer thingy" (so that it becomes gold and with a ribbon ?)

 

[aaronhume]

I have four Seagate 3TB drives in an 8 bay QNAP running in RAID5. It has been running for about two years 24/7 now with no issues at all so far. I had bad experiences with Seagates in the past. I've noticed that Seagates get quite hot and I lost two drives within 3 months (could have bee a bad batch). It was a good thing I was using RAID1 at the time and didn't lose any data. Seagates were the only ones that had 3TB at 7200RPM at the time I purchased them. If WD had 3TB Caviar Blacks at the time, i would have gone for them without hesitation. I loved my mirrored 2TB Caviar Blacks.

Here are three options I can suggest:

Option 1
RAID0 - maximises your storage space but no redundancy (i.e. two 3TB drives in RAID 0 gives you 6TB of usable space). However, if you lose just one drive, you lose ALL 6TB! Not recommended for data storage.

Option 2
RAID1 - mirrored RAID. If you have two 3TB in mirror RAID, you will only end up with 3TB usable space. But you can lose 1 drive and still be okay. As soon as you lose one drive, just go and replace and initiate the RAID rebuild. You have the fun of figuring out how to setup the RAID as well as rebuilding the RAID.

Option 3
No RAID - just two individual drives. There's no point going to RAID0 if you don't need a single 6TB drive, just use them as two individual 3TB drives. There's No RAID hassles and if you lose one drive, you only lose data on that one drive.

If you don't care about losing the data, just use them as two individual drives. If you do care about data loss, go with RAID1 an learn about RAID.

Hope that helps.

Simple and helpful, I cant thank you enough. Thanks m8. btw how do I choose your answer as the "best answer thingy" (so that it becomes gold and with a ribbon ?)

This may be sort of thread-jacking but it is almost the same question....

I just bought 3 of these same Seagate 3TB drives with the intention of another RAID option, RAID 5.

I can get the drives set up as a RAID 5 disk in the motherboard's built in RAID controller, and it shows properly in BIOS however any windows setup (after loading the RAID driver) will list my OS disk and then the three separate 3TB drives rather than the RAID 5 Array and the OS disk...

This has been quite confusing to me, as I don't have a lot of experience with RAID but I did successfully do a RAID5 with 4x 2TB Seagates last fall for a friend, and windows setup showed a single disk rather than 4.

My next alternative is to set up a software RAID 5 in Windows 2008 server which is what I am testing right now, however I am more skeptical of this type of a setup over a straight hardware raid array....

Any thoughts on performance/reliability in this case?

PS. my motherboard is an MSI 970A-G46 (AMD 9 series chipset) all SATA ports are SATA 6.0 Gbps and all accessible through the RAID boot ROM and I am running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise - fresh install on a 500 GB older Seagate drive