[Astara Athene]

For what it’s worth, I swear by the Hitachi Ultrastars (NOT their Deskstars). Are you sure you got Ultrastars?

Some vendors try to sell you Deskstars in place of Ultrastars. The 2TB Deskstars are easily under $150 each, but the Ultrastars — lowest is ~$270 for singles.

I tried Deskstars in a RAID — LSI controller — wouldn’t work. — I tried them separately — they all spun at different speeds! Cheaper raid controllers ignore the speed differential and try to use them anyway and end up with very poor performance.

But the Ultrastars — all spot on. With a 9-wide, (+3 parity) RAID 50, I get 670MB writes, and 850MB reads when doing LARGE, linear read/write tests. You might ask for 900MB/s (assuming 100MB each), but hey.

I’d look either at your disk controller, OR whether or not you really got Ultrastars. Did you pay 270 or more? If not, you probably have Deskstars.

I had some of both — and they DON’t say ultra/desk star on the outside. They just had disk model numbers.

There are 2 model numbers, but I only know one of them off hand “0F10452”.

The seagates ARE a _bit_ faster, but they are also more expensive. I’ve had more problems with seagate drives than hitachi’s. I know Hitachi has a 5 year warrantee (like whatever good that is…)… Does seagate also have that on their Enterprise class drives?

If you are trying RAID with desktop drives, then, unfortunately, you can expect slow performance. Having the drives spin at the same speed is a necessity for RAID.

I think it was a WesternDigital-Enterprise drive — I saw on Amazon — someone was complaining because it had the variable speed problem — completely unsuitable for a high-speed RAID.