[Expired] WD15EARS $85 from Amazon

[GK20]

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Intellipower-Desktop-WD15EARS/dp/B002ZCXJZE

[xamindar]

Dang! Just after I bought that seagate for $89 at Frys. This amazon one doesn't add tax either and shipping is free with saver. Anyone know how long the warranty on these are? I'm guessing 3 years.

 

Should I return or not? Decisions, decisions....

[GaryMaster]

I have grown a little disenchanted with the EARS drives.  

 

My initial synthetic benchmarks measured my 1 year old Seagate ST31500 (1.5TB 7200RPM) drives against the same system with 1TB EARS for both Parity and Data.  

 

Write Results:

Seagate ST31500 (7200 RPM):  17.9MB/s

1TB WDEARS:  15.7MB/s

(12% Slower)

 

Read Results:

Seagate ST31500 (7200 RPM):  43.0MB/s

1TB WDEARS:  42.9MB/s

(<1% Slower)

 

Fairly good results for the green drives, right?

 

I just built another system today using a 1.5TB WDEARS as Parity and a 1.0TB WDEARS as data.  As always, on the EARS drive, I set jumper 7-8 to assure alignment under UNRAID (I had huge performance drops without this on earlier builds).

 

This time, I saw very erratic read performance on the EARS drives and both read and write performance was down - but only for the EARS.  The seagate drives are the same ones I had tested in the above system.  The platform is the same in both cases (i3-530 based H55 system.  The above was an ASUS motherboard this below was the new Zotac Mini ITX H55).  I did use the latest build of UNRAID on the new Zotac system (4.5.3):

 

Write Results:

Seagate ST31500 (7200 RPM):  23.0MB/s

1.5/1.0TB WDEARS:  15.8MB/s

(31% Slower)

 

Read Results:

Seagate ST31500 (7200 RPM):  42.9MB/s

1.5/1.0TB WDEARS:  35.7MB/s

(17% Slower)

 

Not satisfied with the synthetic benchmarks, I did some 5GB file copies from my workstation to the UNRAID NAS.  The real world results were telling me the same thing:  

 

The EARS system took 2:48s to write the file and the Seagate system took 1:59s.  41% slower to write to the EARS system.

 

I would have a difficult time recommending the EARS drives until I can identify the source of the performance variations I have seen from system to system.  Couple this to the need to assure allignment and this drive can yeild very bad results for beginners who are unaware of some of these issues.

 

The prices on these things have been great and the power consumption is very good, but be aware of the potential performance pitfalls before you buy.

[Rajahal]

Thanks for the performance breakdowns, GaryMaster, but despite all that, I couldn't pass this deal up.  While I haven't benchmarked these drives to the extent that you have, in real world use I don't notice the difference between EARS, EADS, etc.

[GaryMaster]

Thanks for the performance breakdowns, GaryMaster, but despite all that, I couldn't pass this deal up.  While I haven't benchmarked these drives to the extent that you have, in real world use I don't notice the difference between EARS, EADS, etc.

 

Rajahal - I completely understand.  I almost jumped on it myself - it was a great price.  I just wanted to give everyone a heads'-up on the erratic performance variation I was seeing with this drive.  41% longer write times was a big deal to me. 

 

[GK20]

Write Results:

Seagate ST31500 (7200 RPM):  17.9MB/s

1TB WDEARS:  15.7MB/s

(12% Slower)

 

Read Results:

Seagate ST31500 (7200 RPM):  43.0MB/s

1TB WDEARS:  42.9MB/s

(<1% Slower)

 

 

Just finished putting in a WD15EARS (with jumper 7/8 on) into my system.

 

(a) During preclear, from console messages, i got around 98MB/sec during zeroing out disk, all other disks are spun down.

      (this number is too good to be true but that is what i saw from console).

 

(b) During data reconstruction because i replaced one of my 500GB disk, i got from 37MB/sec at beginning to around

    57MB/sec in the end depends on how many disks involved in data rebuild. I have mixed of 750GB/1TB/1.5TB disks

    so disk will drop out of construction once data rebuild progress had exceed its capacity which gradually speed up

    reconstruction due to less disk read as well as less data to be XORed.

 

 

 

[Rajahal]

Granted.  I use a cache drive, so the write speed doesn't really matter much to me.  The reads are perfectly acceptable.

 

This is my first time buying a drive from Amazon.  I read that their packing is sub par (even worse than Newegg's), so hopefully the drive arrives in one piece.  While I did receive the confirmation email immediately, the purchase still has not been charged to my bank account - it has been 2 days.  Hopefully there isn't a problem with it.

[gabbott]

Price shows for me to be $99, looks like it went up.

[Rajahal]

11 days to get my hard drive?  Jeez, Newegg has me spoiled.