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WD Green drives in an Areca RAID
Before anyone explodes, I know that Green drives are a no-no, but the damage is done, and there is no possibility of buying reds or enterprise drives except for in the future going forward.
My system very quickly is 5,1 Mac Pro with SmallTree 10GBE card into a HP switch with 10GBE and 1GBE ports, Areca 1882 with 60 odd TB of storage in RAID6 (3TB green drives). 3 or 4 FCP clients playing a stream of ProRes 1080i50 or so connect over gigabit ethernet through the switch (max 100Mb/s all up really…)
I have spent hours going through the plethora of information that is the CC / Bob Zelin Finalshare goldmine, and nothing that I am doing except for having green drives is out of whack with the setup.The drives were bought for just storing raw data, and did not have performance in mind, and they filled that capacity admirably I must say.
Now they are being edited from and unless it is some other basic setup problem, I feel it comes down to the drives. Dropped frames seem to occur mainly when media from the array NOT being accessed is coming up or begins to be played. I get the feeling that the green drives are needing to spin up or unpark their heads or whatever intellipower thing it is that they do to access the media, and can’t do it soon enough.My question is, does anyone have any experience with the wdidle3 program that I have come across repeatedly in my travels? It is my last ditch hope at a solution.
If anyone else can think of anything, i’d be keen to try it and to offer up any extra information required.
Thanks in advance 🙂
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29 Replies
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Too late. I just heard Bob’s head explode from across the country.
BTW, it’s not performance that makes green drives a no-no in RAIDs. When you’re talking total MB/s, all SATA HDDs are pretty similar, no matter the RPMs. RAID drives have to work in teams and green drives are not designed to do that. They will make the RAID randomly go offline because the RAID controller will see drives taking too long to do certain operations and will think the drives have failed.
e
Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
No matter what it costs,
you have to replace the eco drives!
The whole array will fail in the near future.cheers
Rainer
factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems -
Eric,
Actually green drives have a power saving feature, if not in use, they’ll spin down. At least that how I understand them.
Jonathan Schilling
Vertical Sales Manager
Proavio Storage by Enhance Technology Inc.
12221 Florence Ave.
Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670
Dir: 562-777-3498
Main: 562-777-3488 X106
Fax: 562-777-3499
Email: jon@proavio.com -
https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=15554.0
https://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113
It’s amazing that people treat an article I wrote in early 2008 as “the gospel”.
What HP switch are you using ?
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com -
[Murray North] “My question is, does anyone have any experience with the wdidle3 program that I have come across repeatedly in my travels? It is my last ditch hope at a solution.”
WDIdle3 sounds just like a possible solution. Haven’t tried it myself – never worked in Greens in RAID sets. Would love to hear if it worked for you.
Ideally you’d want to do the voodoo on just a few and test them out before changing the timers on production drives.
There’re also warnings to increase the timers rather than disable them.
Good luck.
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Unless I’m mistaken, aren’t the green drives all running at 5400RPM?
Yet another reason to avoid them.
David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.comSales | Integration | Support
David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Alex,
I’m intreaged by your openness of mind. Perhaps we should listen to this unique experiment.
Cheers
Rainer
factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems -
this is the same story as the post above this one. This gentleman could have purchased the correct drives, but he found the absolutely lowest price possible, and this was MUCH more important that spending two minutes to read the spec’s on the drives. Why ? Because it costs SO MUCH LESS MONEY. And now he will suffer.
Don’t worry, there will be plenty more posts like this soon.
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com -
I actually like the idea of sticking it to the man, and instead of paying $50 extra per drive just for the firmware upgrade and maybe $5 worth of hardware (on Red drives), try to use cheap stuff. Google, MS, FB, Amazon – they all get away with that – they use dirt cheap drives with triple redundancy backed by a really good risk management science. A small potato like me wants to get away with that too, and it’s a noble pursuit, in a way. Stick it to the man.
That said, I am a VAR. If a client asks me for an 8-spindle parity RAID, I have to go by the book and use enterprise class drives unless I get a waiver from the client that he understands the risks of using non-enterprise drives.
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Haha I love all these responses! Bob I am suffering and will likely continue to, but that’s all part of the fun! Okay so, whilst in theory I understand that perhaps my green raid should be falling to pieces and failing, it and others like it are kicking ass at backing up our editshares and storing raw camera data etc.
The drive fail rate is unremarkable, though higher certianly than RE drives, and the RAIDs do not degrade every 10 minutes from drives spinning down. We have ~300TB of this kind of storage and I’d go so far as to recommend the ‘ol green drives for this purpose.However that is neither here nor there as this particular raid is being used for editing and seems to be causing the problem.
Running this wdidle on 48 odd drives one by one on some DOS system is a daunting task, and I hope to avoid it, but yes Alex I plan on trying to find a way to test this first, although I don’t think I have the hardware to do so really.
Does anyone have any input as to whether my symptoms can be found on RE drive systems, or perhaps if Red or Black drives are up to the task, or if THEY exhibit similar symptoms as well?
Thanks all 🙂
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