Promise Pegasus drives

[Rainer Wirth]

Hi Neal,

interesting. Can you check which hitachi drives have been in the chassis before they switched to barracudas? If the drives have HUA before the serial number, its enterprise class, if they have got HDS before the serial number its desktop drives. The barracudas are good drives – so to me not as good as HUA’s but the same quality than HDS drives.
It could be that the change of the manufacturer (WD is building the HUA drives, Toshiba is building the HDS drives, both still beeing sold as Hitachis) is the reason.
A drive normally fails either at the beginning of its lifespan (first 6 month) or at the end (after 50.000 working hours), there are always things happening out of the row. So if one drive fails at the beginning, there is nothing unusual happening. You will get a replacement.

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Rainer Wirth]

Hi Neal,

the barracuda drive DM001 (2TB) is in the drive compatability list of sonnet not recommended for Video editing. The 3TB version of the DM001 is not even listed.
For me an alarming signal not using this type of drive in an array system.
cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Rainer Wirth]

This Seagate Barracuda is recommenden for Video editing:
Seagate Barracuda XT, #ST33000651AS (3TB)
Seagate Barracuda, #ST2000DL003 (2TB)

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Eric Hansen]

hey Neil

You freaked me out for a second. I popped all the drives on my 4 R4’s and they’re all Hitachis. I bought them back in August though.

As i posted in another thread, OWC did something similar when a purchased a Qx2 about a year ago. Due to HD shortages, they switched the HDs. They were Seagate Barracudas, the ones not designed for RAIDs. The Qx2 was slow, unstable and kept ejecting from my computer. I sent it back for a refund.

e

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[David Roth weiss]

Neil,

1) Toshiba acquired Hitachi’s hard drive division

2) I can assure you, Promise does not use enterprise level hard drives in it’s Pegasus enclosures. They could not afford to do so at the price point at which they sell.

3) It’s a myth that enterprise level drives are required for RAID arrays. Many of the very best in the business, including most of those who advertise right here on the Cow, have never used enterprise level drives, except by special order.

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Eric Hansen]

This is true regarding the Pegasus RAIDs. I just popped a drive out and looked up the part number. it’s a Deskstar 7K3000. According to Hitachi’s data sheet, it’s recommended for “video editing arrays”.

i believe some of the structural tuning that goes into enterprise drives is for when you have a bunch of 16+ drive RAIDs all in one standing rack. that’s a lot of vibration.

The problem i’ve noticed isn’t that some vendors are swapping non-enterprise drives into their RAIDs. it’s that they’re swapping in drives that were not designed to run in RAIDs at all.

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[David Roth weiss]

[Eric Hansen] “They were Seagate Barracudas, the ones not designed for RAIDs.”

Eric,

Not meaning to be confrontational, but I do keep seeing you repeating this concept/myth about desktop hard drives not being suitable for RAIDs, and that’s just not accurate.

As I responded to Neil, most of the very best in the business have never used enterprise level drives in their arrays, and that’s quote easily verifiable.

FYI, a simple cost-benefit analysis comparing today’s excellent high-quality SATA drives vs enterprise level drives in a “typical” non-enterprise media environment (not absolutely mission-critical), will indicate that there is no appreciable benefit to the customer in using enterprise level drives – in fact, it will show that in a RAID 5 or 6 configuration, when all factors are considered, including the added cost, the typical MTBF, etc., the cost of the longer warranty is not worth the extra $$$.

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Eric Hansen]

Yes, certain desktop drives are designed to work in RAIDs. some are not. I had this faulty Qx2 a while ago. The drives that it contained were not the drives that my clients’ previous Qx2’s had. I looked up the part numbers and Seagate specifically noted in their materials for this part number, that they were not designed for RAID use. They were designed to be used individually and to be energy efficient. That was specific to that line of drives (and not all Barracudas), not the whole Seagate brand or Desktop drives in general.

When you purchase drives, you must double check that the desktop-labeled drive you’re looking at can be used in RAIDs because some cannot. Unfortunately, the terms are being confused when a few years ago, enterprise more or less meant RAID.

the key in your statement is “high quality”. unfortunately, in the name of cost cutting, some vendors are replacing the RAID-quality desktop drives in their RAIDs with lower quality desktop drives that aren’t designed for RAID use.

sorry if what i wrote was misconstrued. I think I need another cup of coffee. 🙂

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[Bob Zelin]

Now David, I am going to make some statements here. This is NOT a personal attack on you. It’s just some statements, so take it easy. We are friends –

ISSUE # 1 –

You state –
Toshiba acquired Hitachi’s hard drive division

I reply –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was founded in 2003 as a merger of the hard disk drive businesses of IBM and Hitachi.[2] Hitachi paid IBM US$2.05 billion for its HDD business.[3]

On March 8, 2012, Western Digital (WD) acquired Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for $3.9 billion in cash and 25 million shares of WD common stock valued at approximately $0.9 billion. The deal resulted in Hitachi, Ltd. owning approximately 10 percent of WD shares outstanding, and reserving the right to designate two individuals to the board of directors of WD. It was agreed that WD would operate with WD Technologies and HGST as wholly owned subsidiaries and they would compete in the marketplace with separate brands and product lines.[4][5][6]

To address the requirements of regulatory agencies, in May 2012 WD divested to Toshiba assets that enabled Toshiba to manufacture and sell 3.5-inch hard drives for the desktop and consumer electronics markets.[

ISSUE # 2 –
Enterprise drives –
you state: It’s a myth that enterprise level drives are required for RAID arrays

REPLY – I have used Seagate SCSI and SATA drives for my entire career until January 2009. In December 2008, January 2009, I put together an early Final Share shared storage system with Seagate desktop SATA drives. I had nothing but failures one after another. We were in a panic. We blamed everyone. Ultimately the following companies told us to ABANDON SEAGATE DRIVES and switch immediately to Hitachi Enterprise series drives. The companies that told me this were the following –
ATTO Technology
JMR
Small Tree
Areca
CI Design

While you and ProMax may be 100% correct, LET ME ASSURE YOU that both ATTO Technology and Areca Technology Corporation DEMAND that enterprise series drives be used with their RAID arrays. I deal with the exact same engineering contacts that ProMax deals with for these two companies, so I have no idea of where ProMax comes up with the statement that
“Many of the very best in the business, including most of those who advertise right here on the Cow, have never used enterprise level drives, except by special order.”
because both ATTO and Areca have told me OVER AND OVER that we should ONLY be using Enterprise series disk drives.

NOW, I am not saying that you are ProMax are wrong. What I am saying is that the vendors that both you and I rely on specifically state that ENTERPRISE series drives should only be used.

from the Western Digital Caviar Black website –
https://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=760

WD Black hard drives are tested and recommended for use in PCs, high-performance workstations and notebook computers.*
Desktop drives are not recommended for use in RAID environments, please consider using WD Red hard drives for home and small office 1-5 bay NAS systems and WD Enterprise hard drives for rackmount and >5 bay NAS systems.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com

[Ron Amborn]

I will start by saying this is not a personal attack on anyone from this forum.

These are the facts stated by the drive manufacturers and not by Maxx Digital. The three drive manufacturers we use are Toshiba, HGST (AKA Hitachi and owned by WD now)and WD. ALL of these companies insist that if you use their drives in a RAID environment, you must use enterprise drives. A very experienced storage rep was in my office earlier and stated that Seagate has the same policy.

Now, that does not mean that the desk top will not work. It only means if you have a problem, they will not support you if you are using desktop drives in a RAID environment. So, I would hope that if companies are selling multi-platform RAIDs, that they are following the rules made by the guys who are making the drives. If you chose to break the rules, then don’t expect to have support from the drive manufacturers.

I have been selling drives for more than 24 years and the one thing that never changes is that the individual manufacturers make the rules. Right or wrong they support the product and decide what works and what doesn’t work. You should always check the controller or storage systems manufacturers’ compatibility lists to see what they recommend.

So, save money at your own risk and the risk of your customers’ data, and in doing so tell the billion dollar companies you know better than they do. We will offer desktop drives for the right environments, which has worked for more than 14 years at Maxx Digital.

Check the websites of hard drive and RAID controller manufacturers, if you think I am misquoting the manufacturers. See below what WD has to say.

Difference between Desktop edition (WD Blue, WD Green and WD Black) and RAID (Enterprise) edition drives

Important: The article below compares the differences between Western Digital Desktop edition (WD Blue, WD Green and WD Black) drives and our Enterprise (WD RE and Velociraptors). This article does not apply to WD Red drives which are designed specifically to be used in a NAS enclosure.

<– –>
Western Digital manufactures desktop edition hard drives and RAID Edition (RE) hard drives. Each type of hard drive is designed to work specifically as a stand-alone drive, or in a multi-drive RAID environment.
If you install and use a desktop edition hard drive connected to a RAID controller, the drive may not work correctly. This is caused by the normal error recovery procedure that a desktop edition hard drive uses.
Note: There are a few cases where the manufacturer of the RAID controller have designed their cards to work with specific model Desktop drives. If this is the case you would need to contact the manufacturer of that controller for any support on that drive while it is used in a RAID environment. Desktop Class Hard Drives are tested and recommended for use in consumer-type RAID applications (RAID-0 / RAID-1). For more information about using a Desktop hard drive in a RAID please see Answer ID 996: Support for WD desktop drives in a RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration.

When an error is found on a desktop edition hard drive, the drive will enter into a deep recovery cycle to attempt to repair the error, recover the data from the problematic area, and then reallocate a dedicated area to replace the problematic area. This process can take up to 2 minutes depending on the severity of the issue. Most RAID controllers allow a very short amount of time for a hard drive to recover from an error. If a hard drive takes too long to complete this process, the drive will be dropped from the RAID array. Most RAID controllers allow from 7 to 15 seconds for error recovery before dropping a hard drive from an array. Western Digital does not recommend installing desktop edition hard drives in an enterprise environment (on a RAID controller).
Western Digital RAID edition hard drives have a feature called TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) which stops the hard drive from entering into a deep recovery cycle. The hard drive will only spend 7 seconds to attempt to recover. This means that the hard drive will not be dropped from a RAID array. While TLER is designed for RAID environments, a drive with TLER enabled will work with no performance decrease when used in non-RAID environments.
Critical: WD Black, WD Green, and WD Blue hard drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD’s Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24×7 RAID applications, and include features like enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing.

https://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1397/~/difference-between-desktop-edition-(wd-blue,-wd-green-and-wd-black)-and-raid

Sincerely,
Ron Amborn President
Maxx Entertainment Digital
21562 Newland Street
Huntington Beach , Ca 92646
Direct 714-374-4944
Cell 714-713-4492 Fax 714-374-3404
ron@maxxdigital.com
http://www.maxxdigital.com