Thanks, I was leaning toward giving the Red NAS drives a shot, but went
with two WD Blue drives, they were on sale really cheap. I noticed some
manufacturers don't even make 1 TB anymore, which is actually what I'd
prefer to stick with. RAID drives with 3 - 4 TB give me the impression
there is a little more room for failure on a RAID, that, and it's more than
I need.

I've used green drives when handed them to me at a previous job for a NAS,
they actually did okay for about a year of large (images) being archived on
them, then one of four started relocating sectors like crazy. I wouldn't
rule the greens out with spares on hand for a home NAS.

I've seen the studies about Seagate. I must of lucked out before they went
south, the first two I have still have their 5 year warranty and no issues
popping up in SMART yet (I think they are about 4 years old now).

Backing up the old raid to an external. With the amount of backups I have,
if I do decide to try zfs before the sticking with a Linux software raid
I'll post the experience here.

Thanks again for all the great suggestions,

--
Jeremy MountainJohnson
Jeremy.MountainJohnson at gmail.com

On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 1:55 PM, <tclug at freakzilla.com> wrote:

> I've been using WD Red drives in my arrays for a few years now. Had one
> (out of like 16) go bad after a year or so, WD replaced it with no hassle
> at all.
>
> I would recommend buying at least 1 extra drive per array, so you have a
> hot-spare.
>
>
> On Mon, 1 Dec 2014, Dan Armbrust wrote:
>
>  On 11/29/2014 09:06 AM, Jeremy MountainJohnson wrote:
>>
>>> Based on a lot of recent tests, I'll probably go with Western Digital
>>> drives for the cost savings and longevity, unless anyone has other
>>> suggestions?
>>>
>>>
>> Based on the pile of dead drives laying on my desk right now (and the
>> links below), avoid Seagate like the plague.  Unless you really like
>> swapping disks all the time.
>> I tried out a WD "Green" drive for an application where performance
>> didn't matter as well (offline storage in a fire safe, with monthly
>> updates), because
>> it was cheap - and it was junk too.  It literally worked 3 times, before
>> failed entirely.
>>
>> Higher end WD is probably better - but lately, I've been spending the
>> extra $ for Hitachi / HGST drives for systems where I don't want to deal
>> with drive failures:
>>
>> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/
>> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-
>> update-september-2014/
>>
>> WD now owns the Hitachi drive line, but they don't seem to have ruined it
>> yet.
>>
>> As far as disk size... 2 or 3 TB isn't that much higher than 1 TB these
>> days....  especially if you go with the cheapest drives, and just deal with
>> the inevitable failures.
>>
>> Depending on how the numbers shake out, however, you might come out ahead
>> just running 3 6TB drives in a mirror config, rather than 5 smaller drives
>> in a different RAID config to get your 2 drive fail-safety.  Another nice
>> aspect of a simple mirror setup, is  you can pull a drive and read it,
>> without needing the RAID config.
>>
>> Dan
>> _______________________________________________
>> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
>> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
>> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>>
>>  _______________________________________________
> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20141201/2971dd5a/attachment.html>