How do I check if a HDD is compatible with a Raid controller?

[QT3]

Hi. I want to use an LSI 9260-8i Raid controller with a set of cheap Seagate 3TB hard drives: ST3000DM001.

The shop I'm buying the disks from (Overclockers UK) says that they are compatible and will work without a problem. Is there any way to be sure though? I've been warned that Green hard drives don't work with Raid controllers, and another shop warned me against using cheap Seagate drives with Raid, saying that they won't work.

 

[spawnkiller]

that's just marketing gimmick, all HDDs are supposed to work correctly as long as they have the same interface, however some have long term issue like Caviar black (that's why they create the RED line of HDD, just for RAID, NAS,etc...) and some seagate can experience that too...

Green will work but if you take green, don't expect it to be fast (that's the point of the raid array, if you pair it with 2 slow drive, you only get results as fast as 1 fast hdd out of it but with a pair of caviar black or red, you'll get almost the double...)

PS: i use 2 Caviar blue for a while with no issues from about Q1 2012 to today...

8 Green drives will still be faster than one faster HDD but i don't know about longevity of these in raid...

I don't know how much HDDs you'll put in your system but i recommend a redundant array to make sure you'll never lose any data and if a drives fail, you can just replace it and rebuild your array...

 

[tomatthe]

Generally you can find the list of supported drives on the raid card manufactures website, not to say others won't work it's just the ones they have tested with.

 

[cats_Paw]

Well, they will probably not work if the firmware is not up to date.
However, i would advice to stay away from seagate hard drives.
They are probably the worst company in the HDD bussiness (how to know for sure? Becouse they are the ones who spend most in publicity, and if your products are good, you dont need to, people will be your publicity).

I had about 5 seagates HDDS and none of them managed to last for 6 months.

Im running Samsungs now (Spinpoints), and while i did have a raid fail once, the hard drives work well separated (over 1.5 years now).

Also, if you go for the raid for speed, go raid 1 configuration, NOT raid 0.

The most common mistake is to belive that raid 0 offers a performance as fast as raid 1.

This is not true. I could try to explain all the reasons why this happens, but it would be very long.
Bottomline, if you want speed and can ditch the extra space, go raid 1. Raid 0 offers almost no benefits over separated disks once they are over 40% full of data.
In fact, Raid 0 only ads to the chances of loosing your data since you are dependand on 2 disks, not 1 (so it at least doubles the chance of fail).