RAID 1 hard drive choice and sata expansion issue

macdudeosx · 03-07-2011, 06:43 PM

I am making a backup file server (Fedora) with one (small) drive for the OS and two (2TB) for a RAID 1 setup.

I am going to buy 3 new hard drives for the RAID 1 setup, two for the active array and one for a spare. I have my choices whittled down to:

Seagate Barracuda
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...365&CatId=4357

or

Western Digital Caviar Green
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136514

I heard WD does not play nice in a RAID arrays, is this true? My RAID is software, not hardware, so will this be an issue? Hard drive speed is not an object because it is a backup server, but the drives life time is important. Any ideas on the fail rates of these two?

My Mobo only has two sata connections, but it has two ide connections. If I am going to have the 2 RAID drives and the 1 OS drive on SATA, would it be better to get a real hardware RAID card? I cant afford the expensive ones, and I have heard bad stories about the cheap SATA raid cards (not working with linux, high failure rate etc..).

macemoneta · 03-07-2011, 07:00 PM

The problem is that the firmware doesn't have TLER functionality (Time Limited Error Recovery) set, and that interferes with RAID on WD Green drives. This has been addressed as a standard on recent drives via smartctl. See this discussion thread (particularly the '06-13-2010 01:43 PM' post) for details.