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Ultrastars, RE4’s or?
Hi,
I’m looking into replacement drives for my Areca 1231 SATA RAID. Currently it has 8x 1TB WD RE3 drives. I’d like some more space and hope to improve performance a little since the RAID will not be as full (for however long that will last…).
The RAID is in my colourgrading workstation running Assimilate Scratch so the main purpose is reading dpx sequences at high speed.
I’m thinking Hitachi Ultrastars or Western Digital RE4’s, of 2TB.
I’ve previously been told lower capacity disks are less prone to problems due to lower data density. Is there a good reason to choose 2TB disks over 3TB disks?
Thanks,
Barend
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7 Replies
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you have an old 3g Areca card. I would first invest in a new host adaptor – either from Areca or ATTO – one that is a modern 6g card.
It is difficult to find 3g drives today.Both RE4’s and Ultrastars are great. You can’t get a 3g 3TB drive – they are only available as 6g – so you need a 6g host adaptor card (Areca 1882x, ATTO R680, etc.), and a 6g backplane RAID chassis.
In general, drives suck, they all break, so don’t think that just because you are going to buy new drives, you will no longer have any failures.
Bob Zelin
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Hi Bob,
Thanks for your reply. Wouldn’t a 6G drive on a 3G port just work (bandwidth limited to 3G of course)?
Barend
Raamw3rk – independent colourist and visual effects artist
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Ultrastars (7K3000, 7K4000) are today’s only drives with 2m hrs MTBF, and the only 6G drives with a 5-year warranty. Plus, they are newer, faster, have larger capacities.
Larger capacities also mean higher number of errors per drive (not necessarily per bits read and written) which means redundancy becomes more important with higher capacity drives.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[AG] “Ultrastars (7K3000, 7K4000) are today’s only drives with 2m hrs MTBF, and the only 6G drives with a 5-year warranty.”
On another thought: WD rates their enterprise drives’ AFR (annualized failure rates) at 0.8%, Hitachi – 0.4%.
Don’t know how reliable these manufacturer-supplied numbers are – as usually, numbers can be tweaked unless it’s a good independent test; so if anyone knows of one – please speak up.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Barend Onneweer] “Thanks for your reply. Wouldn’t a 6G drive on a 3G port just work (bandwidth limited to 3G of course)?”
It would but then how do we make you buy things from us? :p
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Good point… but since the drives typically won’t even max out the 3G bandwidth I’m not sure the added bandwidth of 6G would translate to actual performance increase…
Don’t mind spending the money – but for now would like to squeeze a bit more out of the current system. When I replace the RAID card and backplanes I’ll probably end up getting an entirely new system.
Barend
Raamw3rk – independent colourist and visual effects artist
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[Barend Onneweer] “but since the drives typically won’t even max out the 3G bandwidth I’m not sure the added bandwidth of 6G would translate to actual performance increase…”
Probably not – you’re right – but I wasn’t talking performance as much as reliability.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA
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