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Best hard drive to use in RAID6 case?
Hi All,
I’ve built my own RAID6 array with only the drives left to buy, and my research indicates the ideal drive to use from those in-the-know is a Hitachi 7K1000 1TB drive, “best” means reliability is the most important factor, followed by steady-transfer-rate-performance, then cost.
I’ve been a happy OWC customer for many years and will purchase eight identical drives; they have two versions of this Hitachi drive:
1.0TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B ‘Saturn’, 16MB cache, 3 year warranty, $88 each
1.0TB Hitachi E7K1000 “Saturn” Enterprise-Class, 32MB cache, 5 year warranty $138 eachThe $50/per drive cost difference seems odd, in that it ‘buys’ 2 extra years of warranty and 16MB’s more cache. The total cost of 8 drives is $1104 versus $704, a $400 difference.
Are the UltraStars worth the price premium over the Deskstars? Are they essentially identical drives (excluding only the cache), and the extra $50/per drive is to cover the higher (expected) rate of warranty repair costs?
If the UltraStar drive is optimized for use in RAID arrays, how? What’s different? Better parts? The DeskStar is not necessarily meant for 24/7 operation…this much I know…but is the $50/per drive additional cost of the UltraStar really buying a drive that will last that much longer?
I appreciate experienced replies!
-Kevin Schumacher
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3 Replies
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Enterprise drives are simply the top of the line drives that any company makes, with their strictest quality control and a MTBF (mean time between failures) that exceeds their “consumer level” drives. It’s all just a game of numbers, as any hard drive can fail at any time. A MTBF of 3-million hours simply tells us that a drive can fail any time between hour #1 and hour #6-million plus, with the mean time being at approximately 3-million hours.
Whether you spend the extra money or not, it’s not a life or death decision, because a raid-5 or raid-6 will obviate some of the concerns you might otherwise have regarding hard drive failures, because both will give you the peace of mind that a premature hard drive failure will, at least statistically, not wind up being a major catastrophe for your business.
The bottom line is, for a premium, Hitachi will sell you additional peace of mind. Do you need it? Probably not. Do you want it? Only you can answer that. Is peace of mind worth $400 to you?
BTW, the larger cache certainly does have an impact on read/write operations. How much exactly? Probably not measurable in your day to day operations.
Hope this helps…
David
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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I forgot to mention above that I do prefer Hitachi drives over all others. The manufacturers of my four raids (CalDigit and Firmtek) recommend them and use them in all of their raid sub-systems. Also, apparently Hitachi drives operate with lower power consumption than their competitors.
I can tell you that my own anecdotal experience with Hitachi has been quite good. Other than one drive that came DOA from the factory, every single Hitachi SATA drive I own, that would be about forty drives, is still working perfectly. Many are four years old.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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Hi David,
Thank you for taking time to share your experiences with me. The vendors and tech support people I spoke with stated that the Hitachi drives are reliable and work well in servers and RAID arrays…implying the firmware, feature set & construction make them better suited for this purpose than other vendors drives.
Only time & money will tell, I guess…
–Kevin
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