Consumer drives that are RAID approved per manufacturer?

[ocmusicjunkie]

Just need to see if I'm as slim for options here as I think...

Just had a scare and ended up spending almost 7 hours recovering a corrupt partition that had my entire 850gb of HTPC media files on it. Not going to go through that again now that I saved it, so want to move everything onto a RAID 1 setup with a pair of 1tb drives. I know that WD doesn't approve their Caviar Blue (or Black either, I believe) for RAID use. Not knowing much about the other brands current lineups, is there a non-enterprise (price)level drive that is specified as RAID approved? Doesn't need to be super fast or super huge, just 1tb and as inexpensive as possible (will still keep library internally on WD drive in addition for now).

Thanks guys.

 

[ThomasJ93]

Caviar Black, Blue and Green drives are fine if you wish to run them in RAID 0 or 1. Just don't go for the enterprise level RAID setups (5, 6, 10) with them.

Please also don't forget that a RAID setup does NOT equal a backup! If you want your data to be (more) safe, have a backup running.

 

[dingo07]

Exactly. Ive always used Black drives for RAID and never had an issue

 

[ocmusicjunkie]

I'll have to go back and do my homework so I know how to make more specific reference, but isn't there an issue with the Blue drives dropping out of arrays due to a recovery protection feature they lack? There was something I know was different in the actual design, not just quality, between the Blues and the Red- I don't recall if the Black had been in the same spot or not.

The plan is to just use the external enclosure for a way to backup the data that uses RAID-1 just to protect from THAT disk having an unexpected failure. All my personal storage is redundantly backed up ten-times over in different ways. It's just that having THAT large of block of replaceable media rips makes for a very intensive proposition either to backup or to replace if you don't....

 

[ThomasJ93]

Drives being kicked out of the array is the case with RAID 5. Normal drives keep trying to read a file for too long, so the controller considers them inactive. This causes them to be dropped. With RAID 1, this doesn't happen, so you can use normal drives for this.

 

[ocmusicjunkie]

That makes sense and refreshes my memory about the issue a bit. I never did check into which format arrays were subject to the problem. So, sounds like if I setup my pair of empty 10EZEX's (1tb blue) drives in the array it should be fine.

One other quick question considering how often I hear people who use them warn not to count RAID as a backup system: if a single disk of a RAID 1 fails, how often do you actually have issues restoring the array to retrieve the data to accessible? I would imagine if done quickly before disk #2 goes, it should be in the high 90%'s right?

 

[ThomasJ93]

The odds of two drives failing at the same time or shortly after each other are fairly small. In most scenarios you have enough time to at least get the data you want. This only counts for arrays with a form of redundancy of course. When 1 drive in a RAID 0 array fails, all your data is gone.

The reason people, as well as myself, don't consider RAID the same as a backup, is that there still is the possibility of multiple drives failing. Of course you can have a RAID setup as your backup solution. But never ever consider yourself safe from data loss with just a RAID array.