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 >