Good RAID Englosure for 'green' drives.

[funkytwig]

So my question is what 4 bay RAID enclosure do people recommend. I have a MacPro Desktop so FW800 seems my best option?

Below is some background for the question and why I say green drives.

I have a 4 bay StarTech RAID enclosure (S354UFER) with 4x2GB Samsung (ECO Green) Spinpoint HD204UI Drives. I was having a problem with video not playing smoothly and StarTech said they did not recomend 'green' drives as the power saving in the enclose can conflict with power saving in drive. This may be why I am only getting 60MB/s with RAID 10.

Regards,
Ben

 

[khollister]

So my question is what 4 bay RAID enclosure do people recommend. I have a MacPro Desktop so FW800 seems my best option?

Below is some background for the question and why I say green drives.

I have a 4 bay StarTech RAID enclosure (S354UFER) with 4x2GB Samsung (ECO Green) Spinpoint HD204UI Drives. I was having a problem with video not playing smoothly and StarTech said they did not recomend 'green' drives as the power saving in the enclose can conflict with power saving in drive. This may be why I am only getting 60MB/s with RAID 10.

Regards,
Ben

My experience is that the Samsung 2TB drives are the only green drives that DO work in a RAID. I have 6 of them in a QNAP 459 Pro II NAS running RAID 5 with absolutely no dropouts or issues. 100 MBs writes and 130 MBs reads over GigE.

 

[goodcow]

Drobo.

But be advised, they're not speed machines. Then again, the 2nd generation Drobo and DroboPro hardware haven't been updated in years now. The Drobo S (5-bay) is supposed to be fast though. They've also hinted at Thunderbolt Drobo's coming out soon.

 

[brand]

They've also hinted at Thunderbolt Drobo's coming out soon.

That would be interesting but only if they could do something about the speed and price. Given its ThunderBolt I'm sure they will use that as an excuse to jackup the price.

 

[nanofrog]

So my question is what 4 bay RAID enclosure do people recommend. I have a MacPro Desktop so FW800 seems my best option?

Below is some background for the question and why I say green drives.

I have a 4 bay StarTech RAID enclosure (S354UFER) with 4x2GB Samsung (ECO Green) Spinpoint HD204UI Drives. I was having a problem with video not playing smoothly and StarTech said they did not recommend 'green' drives as the power saving in the enclose can conflict with power saving in drive. This may be why I am only getting 60MB/s with RAID 10.

With the enclosure you have, you can potentially get more speed out of the eSATA interface, and rather inexpensively as well.

Consumer drives can be used with that particular enclosure (not a full-blown RAID controller, but an RoC <RAID on a Chip>). RoC's are cheap, but they're not as fast or robust in terms of recovery options as a proper RAID card.

Unfortunately, consumer grade Green drives, regardless of make, do have the issue that StarTech stated (power saving programming in the drives themselves can cause havoc).

That said, give the eSATA card a shot, and see if that doesn't improve your throughput as FW800 is far more limited (though 60MB/s or so is closer to what you'd expect on USB 2.0 in terms of the interface). eSATA should be able to generate 100MB/s or more with 4x Greens in a 10 configuration (Greens are typically ~77MB/s per disk, and double it due to a 2 disk stripe set; mirroring isn't going to give you a speed increase on an RoC, so the additional throughput is from the stripe).

Cheap to try IMHO, and far cheaper than replacing drives you've already paid for.

 

[pprior]

That would be interesting but only if they could do something about the speed and price. Given its ThunderBolt I'm sure they will use that as an excuse to jackup the price.

In my experience it won't matter. My drobo system (long since gone, I need to update my profile) gave 10-20mb/sec writes over FW800 - well below the interface speed limit. Their internal system is the limit, slapping a faster external connection speed won't do anything.

 

[wonderspark]

My roommate has a Drobo on his Mac Pro, and he dies a little more every time he has to use it. I don't see why people put up with such slow RAID speeds.

Even my single 4TB Hitachi (5K4000) moves data at 129MB/sec all by itself. I really like it. What if you put one or two of those inside your Mac Pro?

 

[derbothaus]

Use Drobo only for backup. Nice interaction with the included software but they sure are slow.