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[1]: Yes, people will say that "real men use a NAS". As of today, Macs can't do iSCSI. Macs can't do 10GigE. Macs can't do FC. The fastest I/O you are going to get is from the Apple-only M.2 wannabee SSD. Even a Thunderbolt drive barely performs better than a USB 3.0 drive.

1. GlobalSAN iSCSI Initiator allows iSCSI Targets. Or if you like F/OSS Solutions, iSCSIIntiator does it, too.

2. Sonnet has a TWIN 10GigE to Thunderbolt adapter. Pricey, yes; but I think that might be the case with 10GigE overall. And you didn't say "cheaply"...

3. Several companies, including Atto, have both Thunderbolt to FC (as well as TB to 10GigE) adapters. Promise has a TB to TWIN 16 Gig FC adapter, too.

Sure, some of these interfaces cost as much as a cheap used-car; but OTOH, the people that need this stuff are generally not just surfing the web and posting stuff on Facebook. And again, you stated flatly that it couldn't be done; NOT that it couldn't be done on a "beer" budget.

So you see, Apple's decision to throw their design-decisions behind Thunderbolt is (finally) beginning to pay-off. They simply don't have to have a pile of dedicated connectors (not to mention the hardware to support them) for them to be able to offer (mostly through 3rd party vendors) these relatively exotic interfaces, for those who need them.

Did they go too far with the new MacBook's "one connector to rule them all" approach? Hell, yeah! But, all-in-all, Apple has made a very wise decision with ThunderBolt, and the proof is that other computer manufacturers are (finally!) beginning to agree.

Your not coming remotely close to the limits of external hard drive enclosures. See http://www.promise.com/us/prod... and http://shop.promise.com/index....

GP said, "external raided enclosures get rather pricey", which you've proven. That Pegasus2 (promise) 4 bay, 4tb, raid array weighs in at $1,199.00. That thing actually has 4x 2tb drives, so I suspect it could be configured in RAID5 for ~6tb of usable space, but that's still over a grand for that.

The inexpensive way to go is to use a dumb enclosure. For example:
* $99 - 4 bay USB3.0 & eSATA by mediasonic: http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
* $269 - 8 bay USB3.0 & eSATA : http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

Or go a bit more pro level but get it used. For example, a Dell MD1000 for $199 with 15 SAS/SATA bays: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-P... ... throw in a bunch of 3tb WD Red's at about $120 each, and come out far below the price of that promise stuff.

Your not coming remotely close to the limits of external hard drive enclosures. See http://www.promise.com/us/prod... and http://shop.promise.com/index....

GP said, "external raided enclosures get rather pricey", which you've proven. That Pegasus2 (promise) 4 bay, 4tb, raid array weighs in at $1,199.00. That thing actually has 4x 2tb drives, so I suspect it could be configured in RAID5 for ~6tb of usable space, but that's still over a grand for that.

The inexpensive way to go is to use a dumb enclosure. For example:
* $99 - 4 bay USB3.0 & eSATA by mediasonic: http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
* $269 - 8 bay USB3.0 & eSATA : http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

Or go a bit more pro level but get it used. For example, a Dell MD1000 for $199 with 15 SAS/SATA bays: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-P... ... throw in a bunch of 3tb WD Red's at about $120 each, and come out far below the price of that promise stuff.

Your not coming remotely close to the limits of external hard drive enclosures. See http://www.promise.com/us/prod... and http://shop.promise.com/index....

Your not coming remotely close to the limits of external hard drive enclosures. See http://www.promise.com/us/prod... and http://shop.promise.com/index....

Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link.

And cheap USB2 keys that hold a couple hundred times as much data as a DVD don't exist. Nope, they do, and are far more convenient and resilient to damage than optical media.

You're right, they do. And let's even assume that I found somewhere on the internet that had some sort of packaging that resembled a DVD case, enabling this particular flash drive to be artfully labeled as the wedding video. What format do you suggest I provide the video in? .mp4? It's a fairly common format, generally well supported, but am I certain that the drive itself will be able to handle the throughput of a high bitrate video? Will the TV (or device connected thereto)? Or will there just be a whole lot of stuttering throughout? If she plugs it into her computer, will that play it back? Windows 8 might support .mp4 natively, but Windows 7/Vista/XP do not. Should I include a VLC installer for her? I don't know what OSX supports out of the box, but I think Quicktime plays it? Should she update Quicktime? What if she wants to bring it to her parent's house to see it - are her parents likely to have a Smart TV, or some other device with a USB input that reads .mp4? .MP4 may be the closest thing for compatibility, but no menus and awkward chapter authoring become a problem. .MKV solves those problems, but now we're playing compatibility roulette all over again. With a 64GB flash drive, I certainly could provide multiple formats, one with menus, one high-bitrate .mp4, one for the iPod, a Quicktime version, and even an MPEG-1 to be absolutely certain it'll play on something. Well, now I've spent $20 on a single flash drive for this bride, and increased my render time by a factor of five.

Or, I can, y'know, give her a DVD. I've yet to know someone who doesn't have the means by which to play back a DVD. If I'm feeling adventurous, I can ask her if she has a Blu-Ray player, and give her one of those. Still cheaper, still simpler, and still more reliable than gambling on a particular video format.

You also need storage space. HD video, art assets, high resolution multitrack audio projects, and CAD drawings aren't exactly compact forms of data, y'know.

Use the local SSD as a buffer for high speed work. Copy from network to local, work, upload back. Clear space, move to next job. If you require high speed links to large disk, use thunderbolt to add dual 10GbE for iSCSI or dual 16Gb fiber channel.

And how is that a better workflow than having one's data locally available on an internal hard drive? It's sure as hell more expensive, and the copy in/copy out plan is what one would generally have to do in that case, but it shouldn't be necessary. It's easily a half-hour each way - a half hour spent working around a technological shortcoming that is only there for design reasons.

That's a rather broad brush to paint with, especially since disk I/O over the LAN starts hitting a ceiling pretty quick. This would be easier to swallow if there were a PCI Express slot to add a 10GigE/Fiber/Infiniband card, but they did away with that, too.

False. See links above. Thunderbolt IS PCI Express. It's on a cable instead of a slot. Whoop de do.

That's indeed a fair point. It's entirely possible to go down that road, but now we're talking a storage array that costs more than the Mac Pro itself. Even the Thunderbolt RAID bays I've seen have cost several hundred dollars, and that's without drives...but I will indeed concede that it's possible. That's a large part of my point though - the standard

Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link.

And cheap USB2 keys that hold a couple hundred times as much data as a DVD don't exist. Nope, they do, and are far more convenient and resilient to damage than optical media.

You also need storage space. HD video, art assets, high resolution multitrack audio projects, and CAD drawings aren't exactly compact forms of data, y'know.

Use the local SSD as a buffer for high speed work. Copy from network to local, work, upload back. Clear space, move to next job. If you require high speed links to large disk, use thunderbolt to add dual 10GbE for iSCSI or dual 16Gb fiber channel.

That's a rather broad brush to paint with, especially since disk I/O over the LAN starts hitting a ceiling pretty quick. This would be easier to swallow if there were a PCI Express slot to add a 10GigE/Fiber/Infiniband card, but they did away with that, too.

False. See links above. Thunderbolt IS PCI Express. It's on a cable instead of a slot. Whoop de do.

I'll agree that the GPU situation in the current Mac Pro is rather underwhelming, and a product of a design decision rather than making available options to the "Pro" customer. However, the GPUs are mounted with BGA connectors, and it would be feasible for someone to use a logic analyzer to figure out which pins on the connector are PCI express, which are DisplayPort, and which are power allowing for someone to make a 3rd party GPU upgrade card (if they could make it work with the thermals), but the market would be so small that nobody would ever turn a profit at it.

Yeah, because being able to plug in dual 16Gb fiber channel absolutely doesn't take care of your storage concerns.

Why do I want a bunch of big dumb rotating disks on my desktop where they can die and lose my data, when I can have hundreds of terabytes (redundant) in an environmentally maintained datacenter, with faster connections than SATA can even dream of?

And really, you're going to complain that the base system doesn't have a fully optimized performance configuration? It's a BASE configuration. You said so yourself.

http://www.promise.com/storage...

Because no one would ever use Fiber Channel for direct access to large disk pools, especially not for direct access to massive libraries of lossless HD video.

And the higher end houses will get a Thunderbolt fiber channel HBA and still have connectivity to exabytes of SAN disk on their "ultrabook" laptop.

Let's see the MacBook Air competition do that as well.

Except for Xsan, which Apple built for exactly that purpose:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xsan

http://help.apple.com/advancedserveradmin/mac/10.8/#apd77AAA155-4BEF-43E3-9F82-5E565CFBDE84

The hardware is typically Promise VTrac these days:
http://www.promise.com/storage/raid_category.aspx?region=en-global&m=192&rsn=40&statistic=Mac

Anyone needing storage over the size of the internal SSD will be looking at external Thunderbolt connected RAID boxes like this one.

RAID is dead Thunderbolt reigns supreme. You heard it here first folks.

In other news, various pieces of hardware simultaneously vanished from the earth as, given that "RAID is dead" and that "Thunderbolt reigns supreme", it was logically impossible for a Thunderbolt-attached RAID device to exist.

Thunderbolt and RAID are completely orthogonal technologies. You can hook up a RAID array using thunderbolt.

If she used a Macbook she could be using this: http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/products/ThunderboltSSD.html

or

This: http://www.promise.com/storage/raid_series.aspx?region=en-global&m=192&rsn1=40&rsn3=47&statistic=pegasus

Either way you get amazing disk performance with a laptop. I edit hundreds of hours of video on mine.

Please plug a 600TB SAN into your eSATA port. We'll wait.

Oh, you can't do that? I can with Thunderbolt and one of these Fiber Channel adapters.

Now I think I'll chain that off of one of these PCI-e breakout boxes so that I can also have a full blown desktop video card on my ultraportable notebook. We'll wait again while you plug a Radeon 6870 into your eSATA.

Thunderbolt is not for storage only.

Of course, what do I know?

Clearly, not much; at least when it comes to this topic. Can you plug a Fiber channel interface into SATA3 for access to a hundred TB SAN? How about a PCI Express card or Gigabit Ethernet?

This is a full expansion bus, not just for storage.

Here's the actual link for above.

Tactics like this are exactly why I prefer systems like MythTV for windows and EyeTV for Mac. Heck, I can much more easily expand my storage space and install commercial skipping scripts with those, so I'll just roll my own PVR.

For sources, you can get clear QAM service on most cable systems, including broadcast digital HDTV. And there's things like Boxee, Hulu, Miro and of course, bittorrent.

get an iSCSI device:
http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=undefined&product_id=226 The Promise VessRAID series is currently available through distribution. Pricing starts at $1,899 for an 8 bay system and ranges to $3,099 for a 16 bay system. A fully populated 16 bay subsystem costs less than 26 cents per gigabyte, using enterprise-class 7200 RPM 2TB hard disk drives.
so basically, $2.6k for a unit @CDW, 16*$300 for 2TB hard drives (newegg)
total $5k for 32TB raw.

when only a complete moron would run these things as a single JBOD volume without any fault tolerance

RAID10 is a perfectly legitimate configuration for a great many applications; redundancy isn't the only reason people get RAID devices, you know.

Anyway, I think it's a fairly limited audience that wants more than 3TB in a cheap-ass desk-side thingy. Seriously, you'd want an 8x1TB RAID5 array on a single, "consumer grade" power supply? Might as well run it as JBOD (actually, that would probably be safer). By the time you get 8 drives in there, you probably want something along the lines of this, with crazy things like a real RAID controller, redundant power , etc. (and doesn't put your 8 drive array behind a dinky GigE interface). It's five times more expensive (sans drives), but you get what you pay for (all things considered, it's still cheap and far from "Enterprise").

Since those who want the maximum amount of space for the absolute lowest price can build their own so easily, who are they going to sell these to?

So, my guess is that they just can't make these things as expandable as you suggest and still be able to sell them for ~$500 to the majority of their customers.

Take a look at http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng. asp?product_id=149 Pretty much what you want...from a decent manufacturer for just $8K (with 15 decent SATA II 250GB drives)

I don't know why you think NFS doesn't support failover; check out Red Hat Cluster (PDF) or Sun Cluster. You will need a RAID array that has two host ports, such as VTrak E310s, IBM DS3200, HP StorageWorks 500, or Xserve RAID.

I would not suggest cluster file systems such as Lustre for a small installation; they're generally designed to scale up to hundreds or thousands of servers, but not to scale down to a handful.

    The one that always annoyed me was Promise. That is, when I was still using their hardware. :)

    http://promise.com/ goes to a blank index page.

    http://www.promise.com/ goes to their real content page.

    The one that always annoyed me was Promise. That is, when I was still using their hardware. :)

    http://promise.com/ goes to a blank index page.

    http://www.promise.com/ goes to their real content page.

What I don't understand about this story:

"noticed the second problem, the #($ing Promise CD doesn't have drivers on it! No, I am not kidding, they ship the card with a CD, but that CD has no drivers on it! Honestly."

The guy is mad because he doesn't have the drivers on a CD (so much so he writes up an article on-line about this fact) but he never bothers to hit up Promise's website to download the drivers.

I'm all for people using whatever OS they need to get the job done, but this article seems a bit dodgy. If the client wanted XP for a file server, then buy him a copy of the OS and invoice him for it (or call HP and tell them your needs and see if they have a different install disk). I'm sure the extra XP license would cost less then paying this guy to fart around for a couple hours attempting to install XP from a restore disk.

If Ubuntu will work for him, fine, use that.

But why install Ubuntu and write up a mini-rant just because you don't have the basic skills to download some drivers on-line.

Something like this ?

Something like this ?

Something like this ?

So, the Xraid has Apple's name attached and it's cheaper than an EMC Clariion. Great. Come on, people! Apple is not in any way, shape, or form making their own fibre-channel RAID gear. To think that is just downright naive and fanboyish. Apple has another OEM make their stuff to their spec. It's just that simple.

Apple has not brought anything to a new price point, either. That's a ridiculous notion!

Apple brings nothing to any price-point worth mentioning. The iPod line is grossly overpriced for what you get, their desktops and notebooks are insanely expensive, and their support is obscenely priced.

Now, to get to something meaningful...

You can find much better FC and iSCSI units for far less if you look around a little. I know for a fact that Promise Tech makes some extremely powerful and very affordable FC and iSCSI chassis. http://www.promise.com/

And before anybody (fanboys) start up with the "Apple is a tier one vendor and Promise is not!" -- I urge you to do your homework on storage. You will find that what Promise is peddling is not only cheaper but far more flexible (check out the VTrak manuals).

I've just built a 2TB RAID server as a hot backup server for work, there's plenty of pre-built stuff on the market but I found it's all way overpriced if you're looking for RAID-5 (or 6). I've got 2TB of usable space on a RAID-5 server for around £1,700, and it's upgradable to 3.5TB. Standard solutions would have cost me anywhere from £5,000 to £12,000.

If you're after RAID-5, don't forget that if a drive fails you want to be able to swop it as quickly and easily as possible. That means buying a spare drive at the outset and ideally having a case with hot-swop capability.

My solution was a Promise RAID controller, a whole bunch of cheap SATA drives and a case with 8 hot swop SATA bays. I'd always recommend Promise for IDE or SATA RAID, I've had too many problems with Adaptec cards in the past, arrays lost, cards fried, etc... Promise cards have always recovered from everything I've thrown at them, even when I've expected to loose data.

I used the SX8300 which, thanks to Slashdot, I've just found is upgradable to RAID-6, sweet :D
http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng. asp?segment=RAID%205%20HBAs&product_id=148

I also found a superb case from Supermicro, the SC743. It's a dream to work in and has more than enough cooling for all those drives. It is a little noisy though:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/tower/? chs=743.

Unfortunately Promise don't guarantee hot swop ability with this case - they'll only guarantee it if you're using their own enclosures, but personally I'm happy enough to take that gamble. My feeling is that the worst case scenario is that it doesn't recognise a new drive automatically and I have to reboot, I can't see me frying a drive or loosing the array.

Good luck with your project, let us know how you get on :)

Ross

You can wait for Sun to release ZFS, install Solaris 10 on an X86 box (or buy a new Sun X4100) Purchase as many Promise Vtrak 15200's as you require, configure them as iSCSI targets, and then use the Solaris 10 iSCSI initiator, and mount them. Then put them in your ZFS pool.

Use your head when configuring redundancy, and glory in your new found storage availability and capacity.

Good luck!

Do you mean something like this?

Actually CDs can boot in two ways, the way you describe is a floppy emulation mode, this is used by linux boot disks. However they can boot in a full disk mode, this is used by all windows install disks. Interestingly some IDE host devices like the Promise Ultra 133TX2 don't support the emulation mode. For more info look at http://www.promise.com/support/faq/faq2_eng.asp?pr oduct_id=87# and select the 3 option on the faq.

James

I am using the Promise Ultra133TX4 combined with raidtools. Granted this is a 4 port (8 devices) PATA controller but I think the 4 port SATA board they have would suit you fine. Setting up software raid under Gentoo was a breeze. I have 6 160gig Hitachi drives in a raid5 configuration and it has been rock stable for over a year (only shutdown for the huricanes in Florida and a kernel upgrade).

Intel's web page for that board is here and the detailed specifications are here.

On page 14 of that PDF you'll note that the two 32/66 slots share the same bus, rather than being independent.

Added to that:

It's only got 10/100 ethernet onboard. I imagine if you don't already have gigabit you'll want it soon and while a 32/33 GB card will probably give you as much speed as you'll get anyway with low end consumer equipment, it's still going to be bogging down the bus that everything else is on.

Those are old 5v PCI slots. Newer cards may not work in them.

The motherboard probably won't handle the newer, high-density PC133 SDRAM and may even *require* ECC RAM. Big $$$$.

The first board you posted was much better (and, I'd imagine, much more expensive). If you want to look for second hand equipment, try to find something that's either an intel P4 or P4 Xeon motherboard, or a P3/P3 Xeon board using a Serverworks chipset.

The board I used in the filserver I built for work was this one. It's got three 64/66+ slots, although they do all share a bus (but a 64/66 bus has quadruple the bandwidth of a 32/33 one), onboard GB and 10/100 ethernet. There's also a variant with onboard SCSI. I imagine it would be quite sufficient for any tasks you'll need it for :).

Also, if you're looking for a 4 channel card, I use one of these in my home server. However, I don't use the hardware RAID features it has - I prefer Linux's software RAID. It is a 32/66 card, but unfortunately it requires a binary kernel driver from Promise (at least on 2.4 systems). I've not had any problems with it at all.

If you haven't already purchased the drives, I'd strongly recommend going SATA. The easier cabling is worth it in itself, IMHO. Certainly when I add another 4 (x200GB) drives to my system in the very near future they'll be SATA.

I am running a Promise Fast Trak 100 Tx2 Pro, it included the RAID 0/1/JBOD Card, and 2 SuperSwap 1000 enclosures. The card is PATA, and the superswap enclosures will allow you to hot swap the drives. Link to Card

I also have the RAID on the motherboard, but it does not support hot swap.

Running FreeBSD, I have Samba, NFS, and Appletalk, BIND9, Apache (for some testing), Postfix (for relaying the mail), and other goodies.

I've had great luch with Promise's Ultratraks. This is an array of IDE drives that connect to a SCSI interface. Using them in RAID5, and yes it does take some time to rebuild the set when you lose a disk, but if you can handle a little down time. Currently using the 8disk tower, populated with Western Digital 120GB drives. Works great, but when a drive fails, it takes about 6 hours to rebuild the set.

As other posters have mentioned, software raid is fine for RAID 0, 1, 0+1. As you get to RAID 3,RAID 5, and RAID 6, however, your processing requirements go up quite a bit.

A SATA RAID 5 card with hardware XOR engine and a DIMM slot for cache might be a cost-effective option for you. (Goes for ~$180 on Pricewatch, or ~$240 on Dealtime)

Oh, and I would have goine with HGST, Western Digital, or Seagate for your drives... but I suppose hardware failure is what RAID 5 is for :)

15 drives, SATA.... Hitatchi 400 GB drives and iSCSI out the back. Hardware RAID! Who could ask for anything more?

Just put together out second 2TB array today, We use the Promise UltraTrak SX8000, this is an 8x ATA disc array --> SCSI. The tower I put together today uses 8 (well 9.. one for hot swapping) WD 2500JD drives. The tower takes care of the actual RAID subsystem, we use, 5, though it supports 1, 10, 3, 30, 5, and 50, and possibly others.
This setup yeilds 1.75TB of usable space, at a cost of $3,708 (if you buy it from MWave good upport, and the best prices I have seen on this stuff), or a realized cost of $2.12/GB. If you go with WD2000JD drives you can save some money, coming in at $3,258 or $2.04/GB.

Promise VTrak 15100

AC&NC JetStor SATA 412S

Promise has a nice off-the-shelf solution and you can get it for arround $3600.

If I were going to do it I'd build it my own by combining a nice case and a 12 port 3Ware controller with whatever server configuration and SATA drives I wanted to get.

I forgot to mention that in my previous message. The internal RAID card absolutely SUCKS ASS.

I'm a huge fan of the external arrays. We've used several over the years, and I have nothing but glowing reviews of the external arrays.

The SX6000 is an internal card. The SX8000 is an external box.

We have one machine with an SX6000 card. It didn't work to start with. The intended machine (A dual AMD 2000+) simply wouldn't boot with it attached. After weeks of going back and forth with the Promise support line, who insisted that it worked on *THEIR* test platform, using the same motherboard and processors, we set it aside, to work on later. A week later, they released a BIOS update for the card, which fixed the problem. The problem was that their BIOS wouldn't allow *ANY* system with the particular chipset to boot. Nice. It wasn't an obscure chipset, so I'm sure there were plenty of people with the same problem.

A friend of mine was using the same card, and at the time he loved it, but at the first failure, his opinion became much like yours (absolutely sucks).

We've used other external arrays by other companies, but those companies seem to come and go too frequently. One company I worked for had an absolutely BEAUTIFUL external array, which came as layers, so you could pick and choose how many drives you wanted it to be capable of. Unfortunately, that company went out of business in the mid 90's.

I like any external array that lets the OS see it as a single SCSI drive, and doesn't take any special drivers, like the Promise SX8000. Hell, any OS sees a single SCSI drive, what more could I ask? :) If I'm putting 8 to 15 drives on a machine, I'd really rather not power them from the machine's power supply. You'll be going through hell with power splitters, and overloading the power supply, even if you don't think you are.

It comes with the drives enclosures, trays and the RAID controller. They're hot swapable and the rebuild time is relatively fast. (4 hours for a 250GB mirror set) $170 from MWAVE.com

I even went so far as to buy a third tray for offsite storage. I replace the offsite tray with one of the production trays once a week. Promise also has a monitoring utility to put on your admin console so you cant get status alerts.

Best of luck!

My goals are to build a file server that can live through a drive failure with no loss of data, and will be easy to rebuild. Ideally, in the event of a failure, I'd just like to remove the bad hard drive and install a new one and be done with it. Is this possible?

How many drives to I need to get this done, 2,4 or 5? What size should they be? I know when you implement RAID, your usable drive space is N% of the total drive space depending on the RAID level."

Promise makes (made?) a device called the Connectstor II that most definitely runs Linux. You plug in two hard drives, fire it up, it configures it as either RAID 0 or RAID 1, and you use the web based interface (Apache) to configure the shares (Samba and NFS) via user accounts (/etc/passwd). If you write them and ask for it, aren't they obligated to give out source?

well....if money was no object, u might want to get one of
These UltraTrax 15000 enclosures takes up to 15 IDE drives, RAID's them and u can connect to it like a SCSI device, getting the best of both worlds, with the price of small one.
The enclosure itself (which has the controllers in it) is about 4000$ and the lowest I've seen was in the 3300-3400's range. And that's without the drives. Just imagine sticking in 250GB drives.

Promise Technologies UltraTrak RM15000 provides a nice way to get into 3U about 1.7TB of logical storage in RAID1 created out of fourteen 250GB ATA/133 hard drives plus a hot spare and still not break a $9,000 budget!

However, I do like the homebrew nature of the 1.2TB firewire drive.

Over a year ago it cost me about $5K, including a SCSI card. Today it would cost me a lot less and I could have more then a terabyte.

Both the Promise RAID box itself has been reliable, and I am quite happy with the WD hard drives.