RAID 1 w/ WD variable speed drive (5400 to 7200)???

pwjohnston

So Best Buy had a sale this weekend with their external 1TB My Book drives($289 were selling for $199 and the regular drive no enclosure was 250) and I bought 2 thinking I could upgrade my 500GB with a 1TB RAID 1.

I come to find that the drives are this “green” energy saving drives that adjust to speed as necessary between 5400 and 7200. This does not make me happy. However, I do some research and they generally get better than 75% user opinion rating and they are supposedly acceptable for RAID.

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WD RE2-GP
SATA Hard Drives
1 TB, 16 MB Cache, Power-saving
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=385

Feature:
RAID-specific time-limited error recovery (TLER) - Pioneered by WD, this feature prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop drives.

Ideal For

Large data centers, web service providers, commercial grade surveillance systems and organizations requiring huge amounts of storage with limited budget and power allotment.

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(Also, I'm using this RAID for DATA ONLY. My OS, SWAP, and Program Files are on another drive on a completely different SATA channel.)

So I load everything up and it runs fine for a couple days. Music and Video could load faster but they’re not choppy when they do load so whatev, it’s a 1TB RAID mirror for 400 bucks. I thought I was set.

Sunday night I load Diskeeper Pro 2008 and everything seems good.

Monday morning, RAID degradation in one of the disks. ****. I gotta goto work and I don’t have time to TS. I get home and both drives have degraded. I monkey around for a bit and delete one of the drives, rebuild the mirror. Everything looks ok when I surf between folders, but when I try to actually load a file the system comes to a CRAWL!

It’s a good thing I have my 500GB drive and I didn’t do anything to it.

So do you guys think it’s the drives or the diskeeper? I’d say it might be the controller(NVIDIA on ASUS A8N-E MoBo), but it’s run find for the last 6 months in a 500GB RAID 1 Mirror. My plan right now is to go home, wipe it, rebuild, and not put diskeeper on to see if it crashes again.

Thoughts?

SmokeH

Hi,

My friend recently use two of 500GB WDC drives. After a week one of them start working very slooooooooooooooooooow and another start getting bad sectors. There was no power failures or system crashes. Both drives were replaces and now every seems to be fine. maybe there is something wrong with one of production series?

Mishra

Interesting. I don't have much time to think or say much at the moment but I do have a comment.

I've always had bad experiences with western digital products. They have always died quicker than any other brand I've ever purchased. I don't know if I just got hit with bad luck but when it comes to drives for your home, WD has never lived up to brands like Maxtor.

SmokeH

Mishra wrote:

Interesting. I don't have much time to think or say much at the moment but I do have a comment.

I've always had bad experiences with western digital products. They have always died quicker than any other brand I've ever purchased. I don't know if I just got hit with bad luck but when it comes to drives for your home, WD has never lived up to brands like Maxtor.

Maybe the new series are getting bad. I have nice experiences with sata and ata series up to 160/200GB. The were really fast. But definitly they don't like high work temperatures In busy enviroment overheat switch can reallllly work often. It often turn off the drives to prevent data from loss. It happens mostly after ~70 C degrees on drive case (CAUTION HOT! )

undomiel

Just for a balance point for Mishra, my experience has been exactly the opposite. Every single Maxtor I've owned had died within a year. Fortunately still within warranty! But they still died none-the-less and one of them pretty spectacularly. Liquid was bubbling out the back! Every WD I've owned has been great though, never had any problems.

Mishra

undomiel wrote:

Just for a balance point for Mishra, my experience has been exactly the opposite. Every single Maxtor I've owned had died within a year. Fortunately still within warranty! But they still died none-the-less and one of them pretty spectacularly. Liquid was bubbling out the back! Every WD I've owned has been great though, never had any problems.

Yeah I have heard of similar stories. It's weird that no one seems to have a great experience with both products. Or at least they aren't saying anything about it.

I still just buy whatever hard drive is cheapest.

Tyrant1919

I've only used WD products. Two Raptors used in raid still chuggin'. Two 400s, and a 750, spinning like champs.

pwjohnston

Mishra wrote:

undomiel wrote:

I still just buy whatever hard drive is cheapest.

If I had money to just throw away I would probably have bought IBM or Hitachi. (But that $100 savings is a tank of gas. . . . j/k) I have used Hitachi, Seagate, Maxtor, WD, Quantum, etc. I think regardless of brand anything that is mass produced is going to have a few duds or under performing units.

My real question is whether the variable speed issue of the spindle being between 5400 and 7200 should be a concern. I was always taught RAID disks "should" be identical. However, if the spindle is of varying speed, how is that even possible?

Anyone know of any programs to monitor disk spindle speed?

snadam

undomiel wrote:

Just for a balance point for Mishra, my experience has been exactly the opposite. Every single Maxtor I've owned had died within a year. Fortunately still within warranty! But they still died none-the-less and one of them pretty spectacularly. Liquid was bubbling out the back! Every WD I've owned has been great though, never had any problems.

funny, but yea I have had little to no problems with WD, and more problems with Maxtor and Seagate. I have an old Iomega drive that is still going strong... but overall I prefer WD. I have only had one WD drive (my 1 year old external for backups) fry on me . Other than that, WD has been good to me.

its all a matter of opinion when you boil it down....

CabbageThe1

its all a matter of opinion when you boil it down....

It's a matter of luck I think, I have never had a problem with WD drives but I know people that will never touch a WD because of bad experiance. I personaly will never touch a Maxtor because I had one that died on me 3 days after I bought it and Maxtor wouldn't touch it and it had a 3 year warranty. I think that some people have better luck with some brands than others.

I don't think Maxtor is a bad brand I have just had bad luck with the brand so......

dynamik

It seems like everyone has their own horror stories for a specific brand. Personally, I've had the worst luck with Maxtors, and I usually go with Seagate or WD. Seagate bought Maxtor awhile back though, so maybe those drives are better now (or that acquisition has made Seagates worse ).

Ahriakin

There are a number of WD models optimised for Raid arrays, they handle error checking in a way that suits it much better also they generally have a higher MTBF rating which is essential when one drive can take the whole thing down (and don't bother with consumer/moetherboard level Raid5 it sucks performance wise). Regardless of which drive you go with make sure to keep them cool, whether you use dedicated drive coolers or have a very well cooled case. I've always prioritised cooling and have only ever had 2 drives fail in about 13 years of personal PCs, 1 maxtor and one WD that died 2 days ago (after running in a well used raid0 array for about 6 years).