hard drives not to use in a RAID:

[Kris Anderson]

Hitachi.

Western Digital.

Stay away from Seagate if it’s important.

[Ola Haldor voll]

I’ve had varying luck with Samsung F1 drives. At the moment I have Western Digital drives in my little RAID.

[Margus Voll]

Last week my soft raid with hitachi 2 x 7k300 3 tb went bad.

1,5 tb hitachis are rock solid.

—

Margus

https://iconstudios.eu

[Peter Eriksson]

How about G-SPEED eS PRO?

Info from their site:

“Four hot-swappable Hitachi Enterprise-class 7200 RPM, 3.5″ 3Gbit SATA drives each with up to 32MB cache”

“2-port, G-Tech PCIe x8 IOP RAID controller with 512MB RAM supports RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5 and 6”

Peter Eriksson

[Jonathon Lee]

RAID HDD’s… I’ve been dealing with this extensively of late. For a RAID to be used with high resolution video and image sequences the best type of HDD’s to use are SAS and Fibre Channel. However, for most of us this is not feasible. Realistically what we end up using are SATA HDD’s.

In my experience some HDD’s are better then others and some should be avoided completely for RAID use. Here is a list of HDD’s that I’ve had success with in a Proavio 4-Bay RAID 5 and in Infortrend Enstor 8 & 16 bay 4-gbps FC-SATA RAID boxes.

Western Digital RE-4
Some of the older series WD HDD’s are ok… RE-2, RE-3, but are not made any more.

DO NOT USE the caviar black, blue OR GP series. Even the RE-4GP. Yes, there is a huge difference in the RE-4 & the RE-4GP. I’m not sure of the specific technical reasons, but it has something to do with the error recovery modes of those HDD’s that make them incompatible with many RAID controllers. Something to do with “recovery time out durations”.

Hatachi Ultrastar. The Ultrastar line is their enterprise version. Do not use thee deskstar line in a RAID-5.

Seagate Constellation ES Series… yes Seagate. Do not use the Baracuda drives… Actually the ES & ES.2 series of Seagate HDD’s are actually pretty good. I’ve used them successfully. But yes any of the 7200.x HDD’s seem to be problematic.

So to sum up…

WD RE-4
Hatachi Ultrastar
Seagate Constellation ES

All of those HDD’s have great performance and have 5 year warranties. These HDD’s are considerably more expensive then their “desktop” counter parts. The 2TB versions run about $240/ea.

– Jonathon

[Adam Berk]

Enterprise drives are never a bad idea (unless they’re green power drives) but I’ve had much success with desktop class drives as well. 15k rpm drives don’t have much advantage in 8 disk or more raid sets on color correction systems that demand high sequential throughput and not much random read throughput. 15k drives make a difference on compositing systems or editing systems where there is a higher demand for random read performance (lots of layers in a comp or fast edits). They’re also good in file servers or san configurations where multiple clients need fast access to data that’s spread out all over the disks. I’ve had these systems running flawlessly in direct attached configurations for several months:

8x Hitachi Desktar 2tb / Areca arc-1220X raid 5
8x Seagate ES.2 1tb / Areca arc-8040 raid 5
4x hitachi deskstar 1tb / highpoint rocketraid 4322 raid 5
4x hitachi deskstar 2tb / highpoint rocketraid 4322 raid 5
15x Seagate barracuda XT 2tb / LSI megaraid 9280-e raid 6
12x Seagate Constellation 2tb SAS / xyratex 5402-F4 dual raid 5 fibre

[Michael Cinquin]

I have 40 WD10EADS in different Raid enclosures running here, and they run great.

If I was to rebuild my Raids from scratch and money was not so tight as it was when I first started, I would go for the Raid Edition, as you take less chance.

Michael Cinquin

Final Cut Pro – Avid Media Composer editor
DaVinci – Color – Baselight colorist
Color profiles for Color
http://www.michaelcinquin.com/tools : tools for FCP | Color | RED | subtitles | Cinema Tools | Timecode – Keycode calculator