Software raid VS hardware raid

[Paul Kraus]

On Jan 30, 2013, at 8:10 AM, Andrea Venturoli wrote:

> You can spend the extra money you spare on the controller buying good disks; as someone else pointed out don't get "desktop-class" ones, but "24x7" ones.

Server Class drives buy you some improvement, but my recent experience with Seagate Barracuda ES.2 drives is not that good. I have had 50% of them fail within the 5-year warranty period. My disks run 24x7 and I use ZFS under FreeBSD 9 so I have not lost any data. I have:

2 x Seagate ES.2 250 GB (one has failed)
4 x Seagate ES.2 1 TB (two have failed)
2 x Hitachi UltraStar 1 TB (pre-WD acquisition), no failures, but they are less than 2 years old. They are also noticeably faster than the Seagate ES.2

I just ordered 2 x WD RE4 500 GB, we'll see how those do

I go out of my way to purchase disks with a 5-year warranty, they are still out there but you have to look for them.

--
Paul Kraus
Deputy Technical Director, LoneStarCon 3
Sound Coordinator, Schenectady Light Opera Company