2TB drives under the duopoly

[mubs]

Don't the high number of reviews (comparatively speaking) on the 'Egg and Amz say anything? Granted, there are crackpots in there, but still.

 

[Mercutio]

People are always more likely to report difficulty than success, or what fraction of drives are being reviewed, or how many drives the reviewer had experience with prior to review.

I have a co-worker who has carried around the same POS Dell Inspiron for seven years. It's a POS. It was a POS the day she got it (the screen brightness is uneven and the ethernet port has never, ever workd -- but she doesn't care about those things). She swears up and down it's the best and most reliable laptop and tells everyone who asks to buy Dell Inspirons, which causes me nothing but pain when I'm asked to make recommendations: "But she said this laptop that costs half as much is better than what you're talking about!"

With the exception of glaring issues, I really only want to read reviews from people who have had contact with a meaningful assortment of different products in a category. For commodity items like disk drives, I would prefer that they have experience with a meaningful volume of any particular model as well. One drive that failed for one user just isn't a significant data point.

 

[mubs]

I'm not suggesting the individual viewpoint is valuable. I'm referring to the aggregate of the opinions. If a WD product has 1500 reviews and is rated at 4.5 eggs or stars, I would seriously consider that product over another that had 20 reviews and 5 eggs or 500 reviews and 4.5 eggs.

 

[sechs]

The problem is sample bias. You have a self-selecting group, which does mean that they are more likely to be edge cases in experience rather than the average. You sample is also limited to people who bought, for example, at NewEgg; who know what kinds of biasing that may introduce.

I don't consider twenty to be a good sample size for product reviews. In fact, I would be suspicious of some kind of review stuffing or other malfeasance, with a small number of glowing reviews. On the other hand, a small number of bad reviews in a larger sample may simply be instructional as to weaknesses that one needs to take into account.

 

[Mercutio]

Newegg has a 2TB 7200rpm Barracuda right now for less than it's selling a lot of 1TB drives.
Weird pricing anomaly.

 

[Mercutio]

The definition of conflicted: One of my students just gave me 24 WD20EADS 2TB Caviar Green drives. They were made in late 2010 but they've never been used.
They were classed by his employer as scrap because they work so poorly in RAID arrays.

 

[ddrueding]

The definition of conflicted: One of my students just gave me 24 WD20EADS 2TB Caviar Green drives. They were made in late 2010 but they've never been used.
They were classed by his employer as scrap because they work so poorly in RAID arrays.

What level of RAID is required before Merc will trust data to WD drives? 61? 11? 111?

 

[Mercutio]

I see you have grasped the nature of my conundrum.

 

[timwhit]

I see you have grasped the nature of my conundrum.

You could give them out to us. I'll even pay shipping.

 

[Handruin]

One man's trash is another man's treasure. I wouldn't snub free drives.

 

[Bozo]

There's always E-Bay

 

[Mercutio]

I am sitting here thinking that I have two completely empty Norco 20-bay chassis sitting in a closet at home. The drives don't work in RAID but maybe I can set them up in FreeNAS each as an individual zPool or something. Or I could do something with WHS, where I know they'll behave well enough to work.

Or I could go to Shelton Fireworks and have a happy 4th of July with them.

 

[Handruin]

You could just not take them if they bother you that much. You could also donate them to a school or some place that could make use of them. You could also do what Bozo suggested and make some money to take your stripper out for a nice evening on the town. I'm sure you'll tell me there is no where to take her, but you get my point.

 

[Mercutio]

Also, I am now considering the ramifications of what RAID111 would be. I'm thinking It would be a duplex (two controllers) copy of a mirror set on two different physical machines.
Which, for WD hardware. sounds like about what I'd need.

 

[Mercutio]

You could just not take them if they bother you that much. You could also donate them to a school or some place that could make use of them. You could also do what Bozo suggested and make some money to take your stripper out for a nice evening on the town. I'm sure you'll tell me there is no where to take her, but you get my point.

I think I could do a lot with 48TB of extra disk space if I actually trusted it to be reliable, or if I didn't care about reliability. I can't afford to add that much to my backups. I guess I could mirror my existing NAS, were there a way to make sure the drives operated well enough as an array to manage that.

I could probably get away with adding them to desktop builds as backup drives, but of course I don't know if they're really reliable and I'm not sure I'd be willing to charge for them, given their provenance in the first place. Yes, I could ebay them if I felt like dealing with the PITA of ebay in the first place. Also: Ebay is a total PITA now.

I usually meet my stripper friend for very casual meals after she comes off shift. Usually we have a choice between McDonald's, Denny's and one particular pizza place that has gross food and worse service but is actually open really late. The order of business is usually letting her sit around for a while to make sure she's sober enough to drive, so we usually hang out at Denny's. Denny's motto should be "We're open until you're sober."

 

[LunarMist]

Damn. I would be very happy with those drives. I have several of the 2TB EADS and they have been fine, especially compressed to the unreliable Samsung 2BG green drives. Today 500GB platters are relatively small so the speeds are on the slow side.

 

[Mercutio]

27 hours after setting up a 12-drive Linux SoftRAID, mdadm tells me the array is degraded. People suggest various fixes online - there's a tool that modifies the firmware to support proper error checking (I'm guessing that voids the warranty); some people suggest disabling NCQ; others claim that limiting the drives to 1.5Gbps SATA helps.

The one place I know WD green drives work well is with Windows Home Server. As a last resort I might do that, but I'm going to try some of these other suggestions when I have the chance. If nothing works well with Linux I think FreeNAS will be my next stop. Some people report that the green drives work well with ZFS.

 

[ddrueding]

I've experienced success when using them in any way that makes the hardware think they are individual drives. This includes Windows Home Server and Windows Dynamic Disk Arrays. I suspect ZFS would be much the same. Anything where the array is configured in some kind of BIOS has never worked well.

 

[LunarMist]

Of course Merc is just trying to abuse them. The consumer drives are meant to be used as singles.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm doing with them what I'd do with any other drive, especially when I have a whole, whole bunch of them. I'm only using half of what I have; ultimately I don't think I'd trust anything less than a RAID51-like configuration to begin with.

 

[MaxBurn]

In softRAID doesn't the hardware see the drives this individual disks anyway? I would have thought that would work.

 

[Mercutio]

Linux and Windows Softraids both work that way. So does ZFS. That said, there may be particulars where one implementation plays nicer than others.

 

[Mercutio]

Apparently WD isn't the only one that is aware their shit is broken.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess these are just Hitachi 5400rpm drives with a different sticker on them.

 

[Mercutio]

The drives definitely do drop out of Windows SoftRAID also. They can't even keep their shit together for an ICH10 RAID1 of two drives.

 

[LunarMist]

I still think that is a deliberate plan to force the RAID users into buying the much more costly RE drives.

 

[LunarMist]

Apparently WD isn't the only one that is aware their shit is broken.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess these are just Hitachi 5400rpm drives with a different sticker on them.

I don't think so. The photos of the entire drive (not cutaway) show the typical WD case shape and the large black dot stickers in the same place as other WD drives.

 

[LunarMist]

I see the reds are already at the Egg. Does anybody understand how they can be designed for only 5-6 bay boxes? Is the firmware keeping track somehow?

 

[Bozo]

It says they were designed for 1-6 drive systems. I didn't see anywhere that you were limited to 6 drives.

 

[Mercutio]

Two and Four drive configurations are very common for low-end NAS setups. Entry level disk controllers often have four SATA ports. FreeNAS likes (or at least its developers strongly encourage) adding disks in groups of five. It's probably more reasonable to target more common configurations. After all, the organization that can afford to buy 8 bay Synology boxes or some 4U monster file server can probably also afford to blow the extra cash to get drives that suck less.
By which I mean drives that aren't made by WD in the first place.

 

[LunarMist]

Two and Four drive configurations are very common for low-end NAS setups. Entry level disk controllers often have four SATA ports. FreeNAS likes (or at least its developers strongly encourage) adding disks in groups of five. It's probably more reasonable to target more common configurations. After all, the organization that can afford to buy 8 bay Synology boxes or some 4U monster file server can probably also afford to blow the extra cash to get drives that suck less.
By which I mean drives that aren't made by WD in the first place.

You mean Seagate? Then the only option will be 7200RPM drives, but I guess hot and noisy is fine in such a system.

 

[Mercutio]

Google says drive heat does not matter.
I don't remember the last time I encountered a 7200rpm drive that I thought was legitimately loud and hot. It was probably a SCSI drive though.

 

[Mercutio]

I stuck four of the drives into my FreeNAS setup this morning. We'll have to see how that works out.

 

[MaxBurn]

You paid up with the fire department?

 

[timwhit]

You paid up with the fire department?

In normal municipalities you don't have to pay the fire department directly.

 

[timwhit]

I ordered two Samsung EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB last week from NewEgg. I started transferring some files to them last night. I hope there's nothing wrong with these drives.

 

[LunarMist]

Not until smoke pours out or the sectors go bad.
Note that the newer ones have different firmware and are not recognized as Samsung drives by the software.

 

[Mercutio]

In normal municipalities you don't have to pay the fire department directly.

I'm sure there's a republican someplace massaging his boner to that idea though.

Anyway, so far the drives have stayed in my zPool. I'm kind of impressed. That's longer than they were able to run in a SoftRAID1.

 

[LunarMist]

I see the reds are already at the Egg.

They jackdoff the price to $200 now.

 

[Mercutio]

... Today I learned that FreeNAS knows my email address and will happily tell me when a drive drops out of an array.

 

[LunarMist]

That is scary.