Re: RAIDFrame and desktop drives; GreenPower

[Jukka Marin <jmarin%embedtronics.fi@localhost>]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 01:18:57PM -0700, Carlos Linares wrote:
> Also, has anyone tried out the new GreenPower Caviar drives?  How are
> they?  Do they run cool?  Are they fast?  Are they quiet?

I bought 12 pcs of 1 TB disks (Digital WD10EACS Caviar GP) some 8 months ago.
They are pretty quiet and run cool.  They are not the fastest disks in the
world, but I think the low power consumption and noiseless operation is worth
the small loss of speed.

However, the disks proved to be extremely unreliable.  One of the 12 died
within 8 hours (it started reporting its capacity as 0 MB).  Four disks
developed bad blocks and SMART errors (some within 24 hours, some after
a few weeks of operation).  The disks were installed in a Supermicro rack
case with good ventilation and the disk temperature never exceeded 40 degrees
C.

After a lot of thinking, I replaced all Caviars with Seagate Barracuda ES.2
ST31000340NS's which use more power, produce more heat - but are faster and
have caused me zero problems.

I still think the Caviar is an interesting drive, but for some reason, they
were the most unreliable drives I have ever used in over 20 years.  Older
(and smaller) Caviars have been working well for several years, so I thought
all Caviars would be alike.

Thanks to Areca RAID controllers, I never lost any data and was able to
replace the Caviars with Barracudas one disk at a time on a live system.
It took a few days to replace all disks and rebuild the RAID6.

  -jm