October 29, 200916 yr 72 HOUR SALE - 62 Hours remaining as of this post. Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive (bare drive) - OEM Link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337&nm_mc=EMC-IGNEFL102909&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL102909-_-HardDrives-_-L0D-_-22148337 Promo Code: EMCMLNX49 -Christopher
October 29, 200916 yr That might be a good option for a parity drive, but given Seagate's troubles lately, I'm avoiding them. For the same price (no promo code needed) you can get a 1.5 TB WD Green drive that could be used as a parity drive, but is probably best suited as a data drive (due to its slower rotational speed). I just ordered one yesterday, should arrive tomorrow. BTW, disregard the Newegg comment about RAID users, unRAID loves green drives.
October 29, 200916 yr I have not had any issue with any of my seagate 1.5TB drives. This Seagate vs WD is getting old. Each vendor has it's own issues. I will probably be buying one of these to replace a parity drive on another machine.
October 29, 200916 yr Author Rajahal, Yea, the WD drives are nice. For me, I prefer speed over power consumption. That WD is 5400 RPM vs 7200 RPM Seagate. I have 7 of these 1.5GB drives and so far they are working great. Thanks for sharing. -Christopher
October 30, 200916 yr Just bought one. Thanks for the heads up! I'll buy another next month. If someone sees this deal again next month, feel free to post a heads up! Thanks!.
October 30, 200916 yr I have not had any issue with any of my seagate 1.5TB drives. This Seagate vs WD is getting old. Each vendor has it's own issues. I will probably be buying one of these to replace a parity drive on another machine. I understand your point, and to some extent I agree. The primary purpose of my post wasn't to bash Seagate, but instead to show that WD had a low power alternative for the same price. If Seagate's LP drives were as cheap as WD's, I would have posted them too. Also, by 'Seagate's troubles' I include their shoddy customer service that PhilH has recently described, not just their firmware issues that seem to have been successfully resolved. I probably should have been more clear on that point. Actually, now that I check, it looks like Seagate's 1.5 TB LP is the same price as WD's 1.5 TB Green drive. 3 egg rating with a bunch of bad reviews, though....that would be enough to deter me, but of course it ultimately comes down to personal preference. Still, Seagate's low power drives spin at 5900 RPMs, which seems like a nice compromise between the speed of 7200 RPMs and the power savings of 5400 RPMs. On a related note, besides 7200 RPMs being better for the parity drive, does it matter at all for the data drives? I thought that even 5400 RPMs is plenty fast enough to saturate a Gigabit LAN network, and therefore it is still the network that is the bottleneck, not the drive's rotational speed. Therefore, I'll always prefer low power to speed, since the speed doesn't gain you anything except potentially faster parity checks. Perhaps it will start to matter more once we have faster than Gigabit LAN networks available to us, but by then I'm sure we'll be using a lot more flash media and SSDs as well. Anyway, sorry to rub you the wrong way, WeeboTech.
October 30, 200916 yr I have not had any issue with any of my seagate 1.5TB drives. This Seagate vs WD is getting old. Each vendor has it's own issues. I will probably be buying one of these to replace a parity drive on another machine. I understand your point, and to some extent I agree. The primary purpose of my post wasn't to bash Seagate, but instead to show that WD had a low power alternative for the same price. If Seagate's LP drives were as cheap as WD's, I would have posted them too. Also, by 'Seagate's troubles' I include their shoddy customer service that PhilH has recently described, not just their firmware issues that seem to have been successfully resolved. I probably should have been more clear on that point. Actually, now that I check, it looks like Seagate's 1.5 TB LP is the same price as WD's 1.5 TB Green drive. 3 egg rating with a bunch of bad reviews, though....that would be enough to deter me, but of course it ultimately comes down to personal preference. Still, Seagate's low power drives spin at 5900 RPMs, which seems like a nice compromise between the speed of 7200 RPMs and the power savings of 5400 RPMs. On a related note, besides 7200 RPMs being better for the parity drive, does it matter at all for the data drives? I thought that even 5400 RPMs is plenty fast enough to saturate a Gigabit LAN network, and therefore it is still the network that is the bottleneck, not the drive's rotational speed. Therefore, I'll always prefer low power to speed, since the speed doesn't gain you anything except potentially faster parity checks. Perhaps it will start to matter more once we have faster than Gigabit LAN networks available to us, but by then I'm sure we'll be using a lot more flash media and SSDs as well. Anyway, sorry to rub you the wrong way, WeeboTech. Data drives are just as involved in setting the speed at which the unRAID array may be written. It is NOT just the parity drive that must read a sector, rotate around a full revolution, then write a sector, rotate around a full revolution, read a sector... etc. The data drive must do exactly the same. Do not get the false impression a faster (7200 RPM) parity drive is all you need to get maximum "write" speed to your array. Yes, it will help... because the two drives will never be in sync. It just means you will be waiting for the data drive to spin more than the parity drive. When checking parity, the drives are ALL being read only, so no matter what drive you use you will be limited by bus bandwidth. When reading from the array, any drive will be able to keep up with the LAN bitrate. It is ONLY when writing to the array will speed be limited by the rotational speed of the disks involved, both the DATA disk and PARITY disk. Joe L.
October 30, 200916 yr Anyway, sorry to rub you the wrong way, WeeboTech. It's not that, work with current facts, Seagate had firmware problems, I don't see them continuing as before. At that particular point in time, I would have said, stay away or wait. It's really based on vendor and point in time because each has it's issues. The issue of Seagate handling the warranty is a bureaucratic one. The firmware issues with stalling is a serious performance issue, but is this still the case? The issue of WD charging, then delaying delivery is a service vs demand issue. They both have issues. Actually, now that I check, it looks like Seagate's 1.5 TB LP is the same price as WD's 1.5 TB Green drive. 3 egg rating with a bunch of bad reviews, though....that would be enough to deter me, but of course it ultimately comes down to personal preference. Still, Seagate's low power drives spin at 5900 RPMs, which seems like a nice compromise between the speed of 7200 RPMs and the power savings of 5400 RPMs. I have one, it works good and it is a lil snappier then the WD's I have. I'm happy with it. On a related note, besides 7200 RPMs being better for the parity drive, does it matter at all for the data drives? I thought that even 5400 RPMs is plenty fast enough to saturate a Gigabit LAN network, and therefore it is still the network that is the bottleneck, not the drive's rotational speed. Therefore, I'll always prefer low power to speed, since the speed doesn't gain you anything except potentially faster parity checks. Perhaps it will start to matter more once we have faster than Gigabit LAN networks available to us, but by then I'm sure we'll be using a lot more flash media and SSDs as well. Sometimes it's based on the lan (local usage) and other times if you have many small files (remote usage), the extra RPM's help locate the file faster. I do notice a difference with many small files. I.E. many pictures that are being scanned through thumbnail view or altered with thumbsplus. Once the file is open and reading sequentially, there is only a small performance difference if the read is local and a negligible performance difference if accessed over the lan.
October 30, 200916 yr Joe L. and WeeboTech, thank you both for your responses. You have certainly clarified the issue for me. So, if I understand it correctly, in order to build an unRAID server optimized for speed all of the drives would have to be 7200 RPMs, or 10,000 RPMs, or any fast speed so long as they all were the same. Having a server with a mixture of 7200 RPM, 5900 RPM, and 5400 RPM drives will always result in somewhat slower write and parity check performance in some cases (when one of the slower data drives is being written to). My server currently has a mixture of 7200 RPM and 5400 RPM drives. If I understand the situation correctly, I surmise that the only benefit of having a 7200 RPM parity drive is that during a write to a 7200 RPM data drive the process with go somewhat faster, since the two disks can 'sync up'. The same would apply to the portions of the parity check in which both the 7200 RPM parity drive and a 7200 RPM data drive are being read. I should therefore expect fluctuation in the reported speed of my parity checks (which would explain why my parity checks generally don't take as long as they initially say they will, if the first data drive to be checked happens to be a 5400 RPM drive). On a sidenote, I find it humorous that this in depth discussion is taking place in a 'good deals' thread, and that it was inspired by my (I thought) innocuous comment about Seagate not being trustworthy...though I expect part of WeeboTech's response was reflecting the thread I started here.
October 30, 200916 yr Good points, Continued here -> http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4592
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.