Re: RAID card recommendation

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 7:35 PM, Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> 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.

When I inquired earlier this summer about using the consumer WDs in a
new server I was told rather firmly by my sales guy "uhm, no". They
put the enterprise drives through the wringer before he said they
seemed ok. They have been great, both green and black series. For
what they are, big SATA drives in RAID-6 or RAID-10 they're quite
good. Moderate to quite good performers at a reasonable price.