On 05/04/12 19:52, Craig Sanders wrote:
MSY has WD Green 3TB for $195, and Seagate 3TB (barracuda, i think) for $219 - WD Green drives are OK but be wary of TLER issues with a raid-card in JBOD mode rather then IT mode.
Avoid the WD "Green" drives -- not only does the performance suck, but WD have messed around with the power saving options. You can't adjust them from the OS via smartctl or hdparm any more, and by default the drive will spin down *every eight seconds* if idle. Even on a mostly-idle Linux system, this results in a spin-up at least once per minute. Yeah. Expect your spindle motor to burn out in a few months. You can adjust it via a special WD utility, but it only works if you reboot into a DOS shell. And, as I said, the performance sucks. Seagate have some 5400 energy-efficient disks too, but reports on the internet suggest their firmware is both buggy AND has terrible performance. (It tries to realign sector writes to match the 4k format, but doesn't seem to do it well) The Samsung 2TB 5400 rpm drives seem like the best option at the moment. I currently have one of those, and two WD greens, and even though they're all correctly aligned for the 4k sectors and stuff, the Samsung is at least 50% faster! Do watch out for that sector alignment gotcha on Linux.. New tools tend to get it right, old ones won't. -Toby