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1. Re: Raid Drives: Hitachi 7k3000 Deskstar vs Seagate Barracuda XT
RjL190365 Jul 27, 2011 8:58 AM (in response to NickH54321)At this point your only choice would be an enterprise-class SATA drive such as Seagate's own Constellation series. The Barracuda XT is not recommended for a parity RAID setup due to its lack of ERC (Seagate's equivalent to Western Digital's TLER) support. In the Barracuda XT's firmware, the ERC support is permanently disabled, especially in newer drives. This, in turn, causes the RAID controller to detect the Seagate drives as "failed" and drop them from the array even though the drives are still good! This results in data corruption and/or loss.
Message was edited by: RjL190365
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2. Re: Raid Drives: Hitachi 7k3000 Deskstar vs Seagate Barracuda XT
Frederic Segard Jul 27, 2011 9:32 AM (in response to NickH54321)Unless I'm missing something, current Barracuda XTs are SATA600, not 300. Or did you mean the non-XT Barracudas?
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/internal-storage/
Price wise, the smallest XT is 2TB, and prices at $140
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148506
Same sized Hitachi's are $120
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145473
But if you are going for speed more the capacity, I'd go with the Hitachi's 1.5TG at $65 each
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145520
You'll get a much less expensive solution, especially in the long run when you'll add more drives to your RAID. At $65, you'll be able to have more disks, and be a lot faster.
If total capacity is not as critical as speed, ask them if they can get the 1.5TB Hitachi model instead of the 2TB.
PS: The Hitachi's have been tested on the Areca.
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Most people use RAID5 because most RAID controlers out there are RAID5s. Only Areca makes RAID3 cards. Loosely explained, the advantage of RAID3 over RAID5 is the efficiency at reading and writing large files (video files) in a single user environment. Perfect for video editors. Also, if a drive fails, the RAID3 performance is not deteriorated. RAID 3 sucks in a multi user file server environment. Multiple access from different tasks bogs down the troughput drasitically. RAID5 on the other hand is way more efficient at reading multiple small files at the "same" time (documents, database access, etc). There is a good performance drop iwhen a drive fails, but it's still able to respond adequatly in a file server environment.
Many say RAID3 is an old inneficient technology and that it's dead. And RAID5 has evolved and is better at everything. Truth is, there is no one solution that does everything well. In reality, each has their place, and it depends largely on your workflow. So I suggest that, when your system is ready, if you have the time, try testing your RAID in both levels, and benchmark it yourself.
Message was edited by: Frederic Segard
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3. Re: Raid Drives: Hitachi 7k3000 Deskstar vs Seagate Barracuda XT
Frederic Segard Jul 27, 2011 9:31 AM (in response to RjL190365)RjL190365 wrote:
At this point your only choice would be an enterprise-class SATA drive such as Seagate's own Constellation series. The Barracuda XT is not recommended for a parity RAID setup due to its lack of ERC (Seagate's equivalent to Western Digital's TLER) support. In the Barracuda XT's firmware, the ERC support is permanently disabled, especially in newer drives. This, in turn, causes the RAID controller to detect the Seagate drives as "failed" and drop them from the array even though the drives are still good! This results in data corruption and/or loss.
Message was edited by: RjL190365
That's a bummer! Good to know!
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4. Re: Raid Drives: Hitachi 7k3000 Deskstar vs Seagate Barracuda XT
mikeklar Jul 27, 2011 11:17 AM (in response to Frederic Segard)Double Bummer
Wish I'd known this earlier
Cheers,
Michael


