Which are raid edition?

[neiroatopelcc]

Hey. I'm usually sticking to WD drives, but the pricing for RE2/RE3 drives have made me wonder if there are cheaper raid certified sata drives around from other makes.
Does someone know what the naming/numbering schemes are for other vendors? (I would think so)

 

[r_manic]

IIRC, the Barracuda 7200.11s are the RAID-capable consumer disks of Seagate.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

you sure? I'm currently testing a 7200.10 drive that failed after just a few months of raid 1 (the other still running) .... the drive appears to be working fine, so it must've been dropped by the raid because of too slow response time (to error correction etc) - kinda hard to believe all .11 drives are raid if the .10 ones aren't .... But I'll check it if I can figure out how.

 

[evongugg]

Here are some of the codes:

If you are looking for reliability I believe the RE2 versions of Western Digital drives are designed for continuous running (same as the NS seagate drives)

Seagate:

The AS drive is the Barracuda 7200.11, desktop version.

The NS drive is the near-line storage/server version.

The NS drive is more reliable, with 1.2M hours MTBF and 0.73% AFR @ 24/7 operation. The AS drive is 750K hours MTBF and 0.34% AFR @ 8/5 operation.

The NS drive also has a few server-tuned tweaks to the firmware.

The newer version of the near-line storage/server version (NS) is called ES.2.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

Thanks.
I know RE drives from WD are raid, but they're a bit pricy.
So I've got to stear clear of AS drives for raid if I find seagate cheaper. That's easy enough to understand

In case you don't know - the real difference between raid and non raid drives isn't really the mtbf or yearly failrate, it's how the firmware handles relocations, seek issues and other errors. If the firrmware tries to correct it for too long, most raid controllers will consider it broken and drop it. Then when it recovers half a second later or something, a rebuild will be iniciated. That's why it's important to run raid drives in raid, and not just any desktop drive.

ps. the WD5000YS and WD5000AAKS drives have an expectedly lower AFR - but the YS drive (RE2) is too expensive.