ServeTheHome – Intel Xeon AMD Opteron RAID Controller Reviews

It has been a long time since I have posted about The Big WHS. At the last update in May 2010, the machine occupied 8U using two 4U enclosures, and was topping 60TB of raw storage capacity. Since then there have been quite a few developments that I thought I would write about. Read the full story

Hitachi’s 7K2000 drives were a favorite among users with large small business and home storage systems because the drives worked well with many RAID cards. A few drawbacks of those drives were that they were not the fastest 7,200rpm drives around, they were not the coolest running, nor the quietest. With its 3TB lineup, Hitachi introduced not just the 7,200rpm successor to the 7K2000 series, the 7K3000 series, but also a “green” drive alternative, the 5K3000 series. Retail availability is still not the best as the drives are just becoming available at major retailers and etailers. Read the full story

Internal hard drives usually carry a manufacturer’s warranty, commonly three years. Personally, I believe that after three years, one wants to replace drives due to the fact that failures start to occur at a greater rate after three years. One other way to source internal drives for the average consumer is to purchase an external drive and to liberate it from the OEM external enclosure. Generally this means voiding any warranty provided for the drives by the manufacturer.  The question is, can purchasing external drives and voiding warranties be less expensive than purchasing internal drives with warranties.

One interesting data point before this article continues, major OEMs (HP, Dell, Apple, and etc.) and storage firms (EMC and NetApp) purchase drives without warranties and receive discounted pricing. Read the full story

At the request of some users, I am putting together a few bits of storage news from the past week. If the response is positive, I may make this a weekly Friday digest. Read the full story

Hitachi has released specs of its new 7,200rpm Deskstar 7K3000 series as well as a new 5,200rpm Deskstar 5K3000 series of hard drives with capacities up to 3TB. Hitachi has been a favored drive make for my personal systems for a while now (I use probably 40% Hitachi with the rest Western Digital and Seagate drives).

Although I did not see a press release on the topic, which is why most news sites probably have not picked this up, a quick browse of Hitachi’s site shows a new Hitachi 5K3000 series drive with an areal density of 411Gbits/ sq. in.  The 5K3000 series promises 29% power savings over the new 7K3000 series. Read the full story

The question of whether or not one can mix 7,200rpm hard drives with 5,400rpm (5,900rpm or other speed) “green” drives in RAID is one that I get asked constantly. My general advice is to not do it. While testing the Supermicro X8SI6-F and Supermicro X8SIL-F with a LSI 9211-8i (essentially making the setups very similar) I ran some Windows ATTO benchmarks which is a pretty decent benchmark for testing best case throughput. Read the full story

This weekend I woke up one morning and decided that I wanted to know if retail packaged drives had a lower DOA rate than OEM drives from Newegg. In all fairness, I think I was just trying to put off a 5am Saturday morning gym trip for a few hours. I ended up filtering Newegg’s hard drive category by internal drives of 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB in capacity. I then went through each result and recorded the quantity of reviews for each of Newegg’s awesome egg-scale along with a few other parameters. It turns out that Newegg did not have as much information on retail packaged hard drives as I had wanted, but I found some interesting results nonetheless. Anyone can do this survey, but hopefully this saves some time. For the most up-to-date information see Newegg.

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DuplicationInfo is a small Windows Home Server (WHS) add-in that allows one to see what Drive Extender is doing. More specifically, DuplicationInfo allows a user to map a specific file stored on the WHS to the drives being used.

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