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Hard Drives Made for RAID Use

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the little-spinny-different dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Hard drive giant Western Digital recently released a very interesting product, hard drives designed to work in a RAID. The Caviar RE SATA 320 GB is an enterprise level drive without native command queueing and uses an SATA interface. In works better in RAID than other drives because of features like its time-limited error recovery and 32-bit CRC error checking, so it is an option when previously only SCSI drives would be considered."

6 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Slashdot: Stories Made For Ad Use by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sheesh, this is a VERY thinly disguised ad. Here's a direct link to NewEgg $169. Has the same details as this "story."

  2. No NCQ? by gbjbaanb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Interesting that they don't have NCQ, whereas SCSI drives generally do (well, called TCQ on SCSI IIRC)

    Is this just marketing speak, has it truly included scsi features, or could it actually be better performing than SCSI in a RAID array?

  3. How does a lack of NCQ help? by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How does the lack of Native Command Queuing improve RAID performance? Generally I thought NCQ improved all drive's performance, and TFA says that NCQ is normally part of Enterprise High-Performance.

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
  4. Sal Cangeloso is a moron by laing · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The manufacturer specifically says to only use these in a RAID-1 configuration (mirroring). They have a reason for this: The error recovery mechanisim is abbreviated. So what does Sal do... He connects two drives in a RAID-0 configuration. Now his data reliability has gone to about 1/4 of a regular drive.

  5. Is it just me or.... by rongage · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is it just me, or did this review stink for lack of proper testing and comparison...

    If I were comparing this product and it's performance, I certainly would not be benchmarking a SATA based RAID setup against a single Parallel ATA drive. Something in this arrangement just doesn't seem... well, logical.

    If you were really going to try to impress me with it's performance, then you would have to show me how it compares to "non-RAID" optimized drives of near simular characteristics. Show me how this drive performs against, say, Hitachi SATA 320 gig drives using an identical test rig. Also show me how this drive compares to 320 gig SCSI drives. Show me the results as JBOD, RAID-0, RAID-1 and RAID-5. You know, like the real world.

    While the graphs are pretty, I'm afraid that this "review" it fairly content-free.

    --
    Ron Gage - Westland, MI
  6. What would REALLY make the drive RAID firendly by jandrese · · Score: 3, Insightful

    IMHO, the biggest things manufacturers could do to make the drives more RAID friendly is to change the name (even with just a v1, v2, etc...) when they change platters.

    Nothing is worse than buying a bunch of drives and a couple of spares and building the array and then discovering down the road that in fact one of your spares came from a different production run and has a slightly different (maybe 3 block smaller) geometry and can't be used on your array. Usually there is absolutely no indication on the box or the drive that one of your drives is different unless you decode the cryptic serial number.

    For that matter, just printing the exact LBA count on the back of the box would be a huge boon.

    This isn't limited to ATA drives either. I've seen it plenty of times in professional SCSI solutions too, especially as the arrays start to get older.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.