Re: RAID card recommendation

Scott Marlowe wrote:
> As far as drives go we've been really happy with WD of late, they make
> large enterprise class SATA drives that don't pull a lot of power
> (green series) and fast SATA drives that pull a bit more but are
> faster (black series).
Be careful to note the caveat that you need their *enterprise class*
drives. When you run into an error on their regular consumer drives,
they get distracted for a while trying to cover the whole thing up, in a
way that's exactly the opposite of the behavior you want for a RAID
configuration. I have a regular consumer WD drive that refuses to admit
that it has a problem such that I can RMA it, but that always generates
an error if I rewrite the whole drive. The behavior of the firmware is
downright shameful. As cheap consumer drives go, I feel like WD has
pulled ahead of everybody else on performance and possibly even actual
reliability, but the error handling of their firmware is so bad I'm
still using Seagate drives--when those fail, as least they're honest
about it.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.com