Hard Drives designed for RAID

[gcortes]

I'm researching a new system for the upcoming Windows 7 release. At this point I'm trying to decide on a RAID solution. For the OS and apps I'm going to use a single Intel 80GB SSD. I might go RAID 1 on the SSDD some day, but thought that might be overkill. For data I am thinking of RAID 1 with SATA hard drives. Should I be concerned about the type of hard drive? I've read a few posts indicating the deep recovery process of some drives (Western Digital?) will cause it to drop out of the array. Would any brand be better at RAID than another? I want to have 1TB of data storage.

My current system is 3 WD 500MB drives in RAID 5. I lost a drive from the array and was able to replace it and rebuild. I decided to go with RAID 1 on the new system from all the issues I've seen in posts and articles. I also thought about RAID 10 for data. I don't get the impression it would help that much.

I'm going to get a eVGA X58 SLI vanilla MB with 6GB of memory. I also run Mozy backup every night so I have an offsite copy of all my data.

Curt

 

[MRFS]

> I decided to go with RAID 1 on the new system from all the issues I've seen in posts and articles.


WD's RAID Edition ("RE") HDDs are excellent,
particularly RE2 and RE3 models which support TLER
and use perpendicular magnetic recording ("PMR"):

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/productcatalog.asp?language=en


e.g.: 2 of these will make a nice RAID 1:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=504

or these:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=503


MRFS

 

[gcortes]

Thanks for the links. I was thinking these drives would be expensive, but the RE3 1TB is nicely priced on NewEgg. The RE4 appears to only come in a 2TB capacity and NewEgg discontinued it for some reason. I have around 200MB of data so 1TB will last me quite some time. I guess I could even go smaller.

 

[sminlal]

To the best of my knowledge there's nothing substantially different about the WD "RE" drives from their other drives - except that they have firmware which limits the amount of time the drives spend in recovery mode. So it makes sense that they're similarly priced.

I don't quite get this "TLER" business though. I understand the rationale, but I question the effectiveness. If a drive has problems reading a sector and cannot get a good read within the shorter timeout period, it's going to have to report that the sector is unreadable. Isn't that just going to kick it out the the array anyway? If so, what's the point?

It might be more effective to use a standard drive which tries harder (ie, longer) to recover the data and simply set the RAID controller to allow a longer timeout period. This isn't something you would want to do with a server, but it should be acceptable for most home users.