2x Seagate 7200.11 1TB or 2x Samsung F1 1 TB @ RAID-1

felix_w · Post by **felix_w** » Wed May 21, 2008 12:07 am

Hi all...

My music-server (mostly music + a small amount of movies):

Antec Fusion with it's own PSU
ASUS M2NPV-VM
Sempron 3000+ (planning to upgrade to Athlon X2 4850e C'n'Quieted...)
2x1GB 533 DDR2
1x Seagate 7200.10 320GB
1x Samsung HD401LJ

I thought of getting a pair of the above drives to make a 1TB raid-1 array for securing my data...but same time want to keep quiet & cool...and of course get the set of the most reliable drives...

I currently have 38C on my Seagate and 35C on my Samsung...with no good ventilation...So i really wouldn't like to get higher than that...i would like to lower my temps overall...

I've read several stuff over the net, but i wanted to have some owners' opinions...

So please post your opinions....

Thanx

oberbimbo · Post by **oberbimbo** » Wed May 21, 2008 1:28 am

If quiet and cool is your mission, use neither. Go for Western Digital Greenpower.

I have used both a F1 1TB an a 1TB GreenPower side by side and the GreenPower is noticeably quieter and uses less power.

nick705 · Post by **nick705** » Wed May 21, 2008 1:51 am

Yes, I agree with the above, the F1 is neither as cool nor as quiet as the GP and its extra speed won't be that much of a benefit for your purposes.

If I were you I wouldn't bother with RAID-1 either - simply run the drives independently, and set up a daily scheduled synchronising operation using one of the many apps designed for the purpose. That way, you can move either drive with its data intact to another PC if need be, and you won't find yourself stuck if your mobo or its RAID controller decides to go AWOL...

felix_w · Post by **felix_w** » Wed May 21, 2008 4:31 am

WD's GP are about 215â‚¬ and both the Samsung and the Seagate are 160â‚¬...

nick 705, the truth is that i hadn't thought of that solution...i was stuck to raid as ulitmate security

...I guess it's a better idea that way...
...though i wonder, since you mentioned it, in raid-1, discs cannot be used as single in another mobo (and having full-access to data) after a controller failure?

oberbimbo, the reason why GP's are quieter is due to the lowered rotational speed, right? 5400 vs. 7200 ?

nick705 · Post by **nick705** » Wed May 21, 2008 5:23 am

felix_w wrote: ...though i wonder, since you mentioned it, in raid-1, discs cannot be used as single in another mobo (and having full-access to data) after a controller failure?

Nope - the OS won't recognise one half of a RAID-1 array as a formatted volume. The data would all be there, and you could probably retrieve it using recovery software, but it wouldn't be a quick or easy procedure.

It's possible to migrate disks in a RAID array to a different controller, and have them picked up and recognised, but the controller would probably need to be the same make, model and firmware/BIOS to stand a decent chance of this happening. If you have a failure a couple of years down the road, there's no guarantee that identical hardware will still be available.

If you run Linux on the server, you could use software RAID, which can usually be moved from one system to another and still be recognised, but maybe that's a can of worms you don't want to open up... personally I like to keep things as simple and foolproof as possible, hence my suggestion of forgetting about RAID and mirroring the data on two independent drives.

The GP's 5400rpm rotational speed is part of the reason for its lower noise/heat characteristics, but I honestly don't think you'd find it any handicap at all in practice. The Samsung is a good deal cheaper, and it's still not exactly a "noisy" drive, but if you search around you'll find quite a few reports of F1 drives behaving unpredictably with nVidia chipsets like on your Asus mobo. That's not to say you definitely *would* have problems, but on the other hand why go looking for trouble?

I don't have any experience of the most recent Seagate drives, as I've avoided them ever since a bad encounter with a 7200.10, but from what I've read elsewhere they don't seem to have improved much in the loudness department. YMMV...

oberbimbo · Post by **oberbimbo** » Wed May 21, 2008 7:59 am

Yes, the GP spin slower which makes less noise and uses less power. That price seems somewhat out of tune, I can get them for 210 CHF in Switzerland...

Matija · Post by **Matija** » Wed May 21, 2008 8:47 am

nick705 wrote:
felix_w wrote: ...though i wonder, since you mentioned it, in raid-1, discs cannot be used as single in another mobo (and having full-access to data) after a controller failure?
Nope - the OS won't recognise one half of a RAID-1 array as a formatted volume. The data would all be there, and you could probably retrieve it using recovery software, but it wouldn't be a quick or easy procedure.

Uhm, no, you can take a drive out and do whatever you want with it. It's exactly like a normal drive - in fact, you can probably even boot from it (might depend on the controller that was used on the original system and if the drive was master or slave in the array).

That's the whole point of RAID-1 - if one of the drives fails, the other is fully operational.

nick705 · Post by **nick705** » Wed May 21, 2008 10:28 am

Matija wrote: Uhm, no, you can take a drive out and do whatever you want with it. It's exactly like a normal drive - in fact, you can probably even boot from it (might depend on the controller that was used on the original system and if the drive was master or slave in the array).

That's the whole point of RAID-1 - if one of the drives fails, the other is fully operational.

hmmm... I've done exactly that (removed one half of a RAID-1 array, and plugged it into a different SATA controller as a non-RAID drive), and Windows just saw it as unpartitioned space.

You may well be right in some circumstances, but I guess it depends on the particular controller and the way it implements RAID... it's certainly not something I'd want to rely on as being a foolproof solution.

Matija · Post by **Matija** » Wed May 21, 2008 10:51 am

That's strange... It shouldn't have happened. If Windows saw it as unpartitioned space, then it lacked the MBR, and it was probably the slave array drive. But if your master went dead, how would the controller rebuild it from the slave without it being an exact copy?

nick705 · Post by **nick705** » Wed May 21, 2008 11:38 am

I'm not sure the MBR (or lack of) was really the issue - I'm guessing the original RAID controller wrote "something" to each drive at a lower level than the partition table in order to create the array, and it was that "something" that prevented Windows from recognising it as a readable single drive. In fact, when I went into disk management, I got a message telling me the drive needed to be re-initialised, so needless to say I'd have been less than amused if it had contained the sole copy of my valuable pr0n collection...

Maybe the original controller would have been able to recreate the array even if the MBR wasn't present, you'd just have to boot from a different drive altogether, add a third drive as the missing half of the array and rebuild it in the normal way. That wouldn't help though if your original controller was no longer usable for whatever reason.

All of which helped convince me that RAID is the creation of Satan, and unless uptime is absolutely critical (unlikely outside a commercial environment), there are simpler and more reliable ways of securing your data...

Matija · Post by **Matija** » Wed May 21, 2008 1:18 pm

I've personally never encountered that

Two old 'Cudas from an i815R behaved normally, and so did the drives from my current i965R.