RAID-5 Small Server - How are Samsungs?

sprognak

sprognak

sprognak

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27 Jan 2006
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Looking at replacing my JBOD 3x320Gb with something more resilient and substantial. Probably a dedicated hardware RAID-5 solution on an AMC controller.

I'm not a big fan of Maxtors due to past systems frying themselves. How are the Samsung SpinPoint F1 750GB SATA-II 32MB Cache drives?
 
I have six of the F1 750 in my Home server and they work fine on both my current Adaptec card and previous 3ware. Very quick and quiet. Also have some Seagate 750 Gb drives, which are a lot lot noiser.
 
Pandobear, home server has a huge bug in it that corrupts files, google it..

i've got 5x400gb samsungs in my raid3
 
I have 3 x 1TB Western Digital RE2's on a Revo64 3port.

performance is around 100MB/sec so not up with high end raid 5 but plenty for any home media / file storage solution.

Raid 3 works well, there is a performance drop since it places all parity data on 1 drive however for a 3 drive solution I don't think the impact is all that significant.

Also the array doesn't take half a day to build and then rebuild everytime there is a hiccup in the power. It's just on and works.

The software and drivers are old and outdated now but for a basic XP file server it works just fine. Mine has been running for over a month without a restart.

AD
 
decto, here's the newest XFX/netcell firmware and drivers for the cards.

http://bleddyn.co.uk/forums/XFX.zip

My array didn't need any configuring after updating the firmware (it updated in windows after installing the new software), the data was all intact, with no problems
 
take a look at the 1tb WD RE2 drives, i've just picked up 5 of them for my raid 5 and they are working a treat.

i was thinking about the 750 F1's myself but went for the 1gb due to them being enterprise class and most likely a lot more reliable + not to mention better scalability for the future.

more quiet altogether than a single 7200.10 (with the quiet motor) and i'm still getting ~200mb/s reads from the 4 of them, the extra is a hotswap for those about to have a pedant attack :p
 
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I'd second the WD RE2-GP drives, certainly at the price they are. Whilst not the fastest they are fast enough and seem ideal for small server, also saves on the leccy bill.
 
I might be missing something here... The Samsung 750Gb's are £1 per 10 gigs. The WD's are £1.26 per 10 gigs for the same capacity or £1.19 for 1Tb and have half the cache...

TLER looks nice on paper (http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2579-001098.pdf) but in reality I've been building corporate RAID-5 volumes on ATA/SATA drives for several years now and never seen error correction timeouts cause a problem...

Google seems to indicate issues with TLER and Intel Matrix Raid too... Anyone seen this?
 
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TLER is designed for hardware raid, you don't want to enable TLER on software raid because you're just asking for trouble.

the WD RE2 are slightly more expensive per gb but they're enterprise class drives + 5yr warranty also.
 
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