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WD Green in RAID 5

xkelley0529
By xkelley0529
in Storage Devices
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Go to solution Solved by Ahnzh,

there is a far better reason to not go with greens: yes, they might be energy efficient and cheap but if you want secure data storage they are no drive you want to stick with really... the thing is: you do not have TLER, like Vitalius pointed it out. That's not everything though. There is a difference. Consumer grade Hard Drives have bearings of less quality for example. The overall build quality is less quality. You have far shorter meantime between failures with consumer drives. Enterprise HDDs are calibrated superior as well. You can see that by having a look at the unrecoverable error rate. As a little explanation: that's an error that's faulty read. Not because of corrupted data but because of for example wind pressure in the drive that makes the heads that read the data swing so unfavorably that they make an error reading correct data. For consumer drives that's 10^14, for enterprise drives that's 10^15 or 10^16. that's a number that's hard to get, so a number that's easier to understand is: around 12 TB data that's read from the consumer level drive compared to a whopping 120TB from an enterprise level drive. for a 3x1TB RAID5 that's unimportant but for a 4x4TB Raid5 it IS important. What's more important for you though is, that the difference in parts quality in the consumer level drives makes them vulnerable to being used in NAS in general. Why? Because in NAS devices you usually want to spin them down (stop the rotation) when not used because: energy consumption. BUT since the NAS is running they spin up regularly because indexes need to be be up to date, you want to access stuff from it regularly, connection is checked from connected clients or whatever it may be. I just can talk about my own NAS experience but i would say they power up every 20 minutes. For HDD components that's actually pretty stressful. Greens are getting wrecked by it from what i read in various articles in newspapers, threads in forums or IT talk in general with friends or at work. It's perfect though as System drives for small business workstations though, the type that's basically used to run Word/Excel/Outlook/Your_Browser_Of_Choice with the average user in front of it that calls the IT guys for the slightest problems (no offense, just want to reflect their knowledge about computers with this). The Different in prices is like: 55 Dollars for a Green, 65 for a Red (with TLER and better bearings and electrical powered parts) and 85 for Seagate Constellation ES.3 1TB (with full enterprise quality). 

 

From what I've read, they do not have TLER either. 

Things I know have TLER:
WD Reds
Seagate NAS
Hitachi Deskstars (depends on the model IIRC)

There may be more, but I don't know of them.

If price is an issue, I suggest buying a single 3TB drive instead, then buying another one later for RAID 1. Then it can be any drive really. Parity RAID is only worth it with TLER enabled drives imo.
 

 

Good list to narrow it down. I actually began to dislike WD Reds lately. Some of my close friends got serious problems with them. Most of them running QNAPs or Synology NAS devices, but one running them in a freeNAS home server as well. Everyone running 4 or 5 disk RAID5s one drive failed during the first year. In 2 cases they didn't even hold for 3 months and in one case the second one gave up while rebuilding the RAID. I have heard nothing about Seagate NASs (neither good nor bad) which makes them a better choice possibly, but that might be because a lot of people favored Western Digital drives lately. If you are willing to spend into the future though go for Seagate Constellation ES.3.! Like i said, it's like 30 Dollars per drive but they will run the next years, won't let you down AND perform really well. I had a QNAP 469L and got 4x1TB Constellation ES.3 in it since I just picked a drive out of the compatibility list. I went to upgrade it with WD Reds (LOL) and really felt how powerful these drives were. I missed them so much actually that i sold the NAS to a friend (where it blew up a Red half a year later)

 

Then a TLER enabled drive for RAID 5 is your only real option.

THIS

 

Leaves open: Seagate NAS and an entry level enterprise HDD.

 

Again, try to go with the Seagate Constellation ES.3

 

 

 

edit: I hope you read this since you just posted 1 minute ago and pretty much told your question was solved, i put quite some time into this explaining various stuff

Posted

don't RAID green drives... just don't do it.

You'll have performance issues and in some cases when the green drives turn off to save power, the controller will think it lost a drive and throw an alarm or start a rebuild.

 

spend a couple bucks more and at least get the WD Blue's. The Seagate barracuda line is pretty cheap and performs well.

My Server - Update 1 - Update 2 - Update 3 - Update 4

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Posted

There's a very big reason not to do this. Green drives don't have TLER which means that the redundancy of RAID 5 is lost (effectively).

For a more detailed explanation, read this. 

Blues won't change that either. They don't have TLER. You need either WD Reds, or any of the NAS oriented drives (i.e. Hitachi Deskstar, Seagate NAS, etc).

There is no purpose in RAID 5ing non-NAS drives. The redundancy is lost and you lose performance too. You gain nothing. 

† Christian Member †

For my pertinent links to guides, reviews, and anything similar, go here, and look under the spoiler labeled such. A brief history of Unix and it's relation to OS X by Builder.

 

 

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Posted

What about Barracudas from Seagate?

From what I've read, they do not have TLER either. 

Things I know have TLER:

WD Reds

Seagate NAS

Hitachi Deskstars (depends on the model IIRC)

There may be more, but I don't know of them.

If price is an issue, I suggest buying a single 3TB drive instead, then buying another one later for RAID 1. Then it can be any drive really. Parity RAID is only worth it with TLER enabled drives imo.

 

† Christian Member †

For my pertinent links to guides, reviews, and anything similar, go here, and look under the spoiler labeled such. A brief history of Unix and it's relation to OS X by Builder.

 

 

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If price is an issue, I suggest buying a single 3TB drive instead, then buying another one later for RAID 1. Then it can be any drive really. Parity RAID is only worth it with TLER enabled drives imo.

 

Well I am one of those OCD people that has to make every thing uniform; one drive cage in my next case (750D) will hold 3 drives so I decided that I would either fill that up with drives or use just SSD's. And I need mass storage for my production of YouTube vid's. And I also needed redundancy on an odd number of drives, so I couldn't use RAID 1, or 10 because they require an even amount of drives.

Youtube Channel: youtube.com/ExoGamer0529

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Well I am one of those OCD people that has to make every thing uniform; one drive cage in my next case (750D) will hold 3 drives so I decided that I would either fill that up with drives or use just SSD's. And I need mass storage for my production of YouTube vid's. And I also needed redundancy on an odd number of drives, so I couldn't use RAID 1, or 10 because they require an even amount of drives.

Then a TLER enabled drive for RAID 5 is your only real option.

† Christian Member †

For my pertinent links to guides, reviews, and anything similar, go here, and look under the spoiler labeled such. A brief history of Unix and it's relation to OS X by Builder.

 

 

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there is a far better reason to not go with greens: yes, they might be energy efficient and cheap but if you want secure data storage they are no drive you want to stick with really... the thing is: you do not have TLER, like Vitalius pointed it out. That's not everything though. There is a difference. Consumer grade Hard Drives have bearings of less quality for example. The overall build quality is less quality. You have far shorter meantime between failures with consumer drives. Enterprise HDDs are calibrated superior as well. You can see that by having a look at the unrecoverable error rate. As a little explanation: that's an error that's faulty read. Not because of corrupted data but because of for example wind pressure in the drive that makes the heads that read the data swing so unfavorably that they make an error reading correct data. For consumer drives that's 10^14, for enterprise drives that's 10^15 or 10^16. that's a number that's hard to get, so a number that's easier to understand is: around 12 TB data that's read from the consumer level drive compared to a whopping 120TB from an enterprise level drive. for a 3x1TB RAID5 that's unimportant but for a 4x4TB Raid5 it IS important. What's more important for you though is, that the difference in parts quality in the consumer level drives makes them vulnerable to being used in NAS in general. Why? Because in NAS devices you usually want to spin them down (stop the rotation) when not used because: energy consumption. BUT since the NAS is running they spin up regularly because indexes need to be be up to date, you want to access stuff from it regularly, connection is checked from connected clients or whatever it may be. I just can talk about my own NAS experience but i would say they power up every 20 minutes. For HDD components that's actually pretty stressful. Greens are getting wrecked by it from what i read in various articles in newspapers, threads in forums or IT talk in general with friends or at work. It's perfect though as System drives for small business workstations though, the type that's basically used to run Word/Excel/Outlook/Your_Browser_Of_Choice with the average user in front of it that calls the IT guys for the slightest problems (no offense, just want to reflect their knowledge about computers with this). The Different in prices is like: 55 Dollars for a Green, 65 for a Red (with TLER and better bearings and electrical powered parts) and 85 for Seagate Constellation ES.3 1TB (with full enterprise quality). 

 

From what I've read, they do not have TLER either. 

Things I know have TLER:
WD Reds
Seagate NAS
Hitachi Deskstars (depends on the model IIRC)

There may be more, but I don't know of them.

If price is an issue, I suggest buying a single 3TB drive instead, then buying another one later for RAID 1. Then it can be any drive really. Parity RAID is only worth it with TLER enabled drives imo.
 

 

Good list to narrow it down. I actually began to dislike WD Reds lately. Some of my close friends got serious problems with them. Most of them running QNAPs or Synology NAS devices, but one running them in a freeNAS home server as well. Everyone running 4 or 5 disk RAID5s one drive failed during the first year. In 2 cases they didn't even hold for 3 months and in one case the second one gave up while rebuilding the RAID. I have heard nothing about Seagate NASs (neither good nor bad) which makes them a better choice possibly, but that might be because a lot of people favored Western Digital drives lately. If you are willing to spend into the future though go for Seagate Constellation ES.3.! Like i said, it's like 30 Dollars per drive but they will run the next years, won't let you down AND perform really well. I had a QNAP 469L and got 4x1TB Constellation ES.3 in it since I just picked a drive out of the compatibility list. I went to upgrade it with WD Reds (LOL) and really felt how powerful these drives were. I missed them so much actually that i sold the NAS to a friend (where it blew up a Red half a year later)

 

Then a TLER enabled drive for RAID 5 is your only real option.

THIS

 

Leaves open: Seagate NAS and an entry level enterprise HDD.

 

Again, try to go with the Seagate Constellation ES.3

 

 

 

edit: I hope you read this since you just posted 1 minute ago and pretty much told your question was solved, i put quite some time into this explaining various stuff

My builds:


'Baldur' - Data Server - Build Log


'Hlin' - UTM Gateway Server - Build Log

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