What to do with WD Caviar Black?

[Dynomight]

So, a couple of years ago, I snapped up four 2 TB WD Caviar Blacks when there was scant information regarding suitability in RAIDs. As the machine was a test server, I configured all four as RAID 0 and did daily backups. Sure enough, eventually one of the drives began underperfoming significantly and so I switched to two RAID 0 drives (chatter and WD claimed that would be fine). Not.

So, now I am planning to put the server into "production" using 4 WD Reds. The question is: What to do with my Blacks? I already have a 3 TB WD green for daily backups and my OS drive is an Inferno 250 GB SSD. Also, before I go buying the Reds, would performance improve if I simply instead created an expanded volume using the Blacks?

The server is for Home Office use which is pretty much just me and a few remote consultants pushing data around and testing database intensive apps in hosted VMWare machines. I/O loads will either be almost nothing or heavy - no middle ground. I am not overly concerned about reliability because of the daily backup redundancies I have in place. My MOBO is an X8DAL-i.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/qpi/5500/x8dal-i.cfm

BTW, I've been using Windows 8 RAID 0 after reading using MOBO RAID would be worse...

Thanks in advance for the input.

 

[elmo2006]

In my opinion, I would simply set them up as RAID0 via an OS software RAID. I personally have the following drives in a software RAID within 8.1:

2xWD 1.5TB Greens = 3TB
2xWD 1TB Black = 2TB

I have them running 24 hours a day for the past year without issue. Please note that I also have ALL my data backed up to external drives and switch between an onsite and offsite drive.

Thus far they are set up this way to partition my HD media and my personal data files.

I have also performed a number of re-installs and image recoveries without losing access to the drives i.e. data intact.

 

[Dynomight]

I ended up keeping the Blacks and putting them into a RAID10. 4+ months and still no problems.