Green Drives and RAID

[JackMDS]

RAID Lovers may be you want to look at this.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TEKHD

 

[nanaki333]

i'm a bit taken back that this guy is an expert, yet he knowingly runs WD Green drives. even pointing out he has a drobo right next time filled with said drives.... i've never used green drives in anything but storage drives, and usually only storage drives i use as an offline backup i can put on a shelf.

 

[_Rick_]

Never had a rebuilt on mdadm/Linux RAID due to error recovery.
Yesterday I did have a freeze-up which may have been a read error recovery, but the timeout for the software RAID wasn't hit.

If you stick to performance oriented controllers, then of course you should use performance oriented disks. But for storage in a stupid NAS? No way.

 

[Smoblikat]

My home server runs green drives and i have nothing but good things to say. We took then out of external drives and put it in the server and we always have instant access to it, never had the stupid head parking or anything that this guy was talking about. In fact, in about an hour UPS should be dropping off a new 2TB green drive for me.

 

[Cyborg]

I have two WD green drives in RAID 1. I used wdidle3 from WD to modify head parking time. I set mine at 5 minutes (as opposed to the default 8 seconds). However, you can disable the auto head park completely and let your OS handle spindown.

Cheap and quiet high capacity drives and now with longer life and lower wait times.

 

[Emulex]

Green drives work fine with qnap/drobo since they ignore all error systems and just do their own thing.

RE4-GP drives work quite fine in raid as well. Not sure how RED are better than RE4-GP.

I've found it's just better to leave the drives going as the raid controller goes to patrol/bad sector finder mode after 0-30(configurable) seconds of idle. 0 is used when you want to really scrub the drive, it essentially means interleave scrubbing with disk activity even at the cost of lower performance. Start with 0 then back off to 1 or 3 seconds so the drives are always seeking out poor sectors and repairing them before they become a big problem.