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Best Hard Drives and SATA Card for a SATA RAID array
I am looking at putting together a SATA RAID array. I haven’t decided if it is going to be internal or external, it looks like internal for the moment. I was wondering what the best hard drives would be to use in the RAID array.
In the past I have usually stuck with IBM/Hitachi HDs, but I have been hearing that the new Seagates are incredibly fast and I have also heard good things about Maxtor (or was it Western Digital) HDs with 16 MB caches. Does anyone have any experience with these HDs or links to articles that may rate the drives?
Also, when it comes to SATA Cards are Sonnets pretty much the way to go? I was thinking the Tempo-X eSATA 4+4 if i go internal or eSATA 8 if i go external.
Rob
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6 Replies
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Go to barefeats.com or another of the sites I list below and do a SATA search. Some test them all, singly and/or as RAIDS. It at least points you in the right direction.
https://www.storagereview.com/
https://www.hothardware.com/
https://techreport.com/
https://www.tomshardware.com/index.htmlHTH,
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IMHO, stay away from Maxtor drives. IBM Hitachi or Seagate are solid.
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I agree with the Hitachi/Seagate as best of breed. Also, look at the new SATA II (aka Serial ATA 300). Doubles the working read/write speed to approximately 90mb/s to/from a single drive.
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SATA II…yes I have read about this. I know that the Maxtor Diamond Max 10s with 16mb cache are SATA II, does anyone know of other models? Do you need a special SATA Controler for these HDs or any PCI-X card will do?
Rob
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I’ve seen an Adaptec SATA II controller, Seagate SATA II drives, and Hitachi SATA II drives. It seems like the technology is starting to pick up. Also, even if you don’t have an SATA II controller most SATA II drives seem to state they are backwards-compatible with standard SATA.
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SATA II is here, they’re all making them. As for Maxtor drives, I never owned one, until last week. They’ve had a bad (and I think deserved) reputation, but from what I’ve been reading, they’re good drives these days. The Diamond Max is their consumer line, but has a 3 year warranty. The MaxLineIII is their Pro line, and comes with a 5 year warranty. Most of their highest performing drives come in both their lines (and they have 16MB caches), so the extra warranty/quality/cost might be worth it. In my case, I bought a Diamond MaxIII 300G for a FW drive to store miscellaneous stuff. It won’t be used for anything but non-critical files. But I think I *would* buy Maxtors now even for media drives.
Ed
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