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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

Western Digital today announced two new drives in their 3.5″ Green series with capacities of 2.5TB and 3TB. This is a major milestone for the storage industry as Windows XP 32-bit variants (still a widely used operating systems and the basis for Windows Home Server (WHS) V1) is unable to utilize drives larger than 2.19TB as primary boot drives. Also, Western Digital will reportedly be shipping the 2.5TB and 3TB drives with HBAs with AHCI enabled.

It should be noted that for a 64-bit system to boot from a GPT drive one would need to have a UEFI enabled motherboard (there are quite a few Intel boards using UEFI at the moment. Frankly, in the PC space, major UEFI support is well overdue so I see this as a welcome step in pushing more motherboard manufacturers to support UEFI over legacy BIOS. Read the full story

Just as a quick update to those who are following this build. Some adjustments have been made ove the past week.

First, I finally decided that 32 ports from two Adaptec 31605′s would first off be slightly less than I had wanted. I realized that while the initial build would hold 19-20 1.5TB drives, 6x 2TB drives, and 4x 1TB drives, odds are that I would want to add another 6-7 2TB drives in the next six months if for no other reason just to spread the storage a bit more.

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Since there are some requests here are the servers side by-side. The New WHS is on burn-in duty while the old WHS has had 9.5TB removed thus far. I moved the cases to somewhere that is more comfortable for me to work from in anticipation of the “final” build this week. Also placing them next to each other made it really easy to segment the two servers on a dedicated switch for doing the file transfer.

Old WHS Being dismantled on the left, new WHS doing burn-in on right, IBM power supply in middle.

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Just as an update. I installed the second Adaptec 31605 today, filling all 16 ports with 8x WD Greens, 6x Hitachi 2TB, and 2x Hitachi 1TB drives. There is an additional 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 being used as an OS drive. That’s 27.5TiB raw capacity.

Here’s a view of all the drives currently in The Big WHS. Note, I may have killed yet another WD Green. A single SMART error so I’m making quadruple sure that something isn’t wrong.

17 Drives, 27.5TiB Raw installed for testing

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Continuing to test the new WHS box, I was treated to yet another new Western Digital Green failure this week. Ridiculous!

This was the second (of 8 new) WD greens to fail in its first week.

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At around 1:30AM I woke up to what I believed was the fire alarm. After about 30 seconds outside in the cold, I realized that it was not a fire alarm, but rather an Adaptec controller alarm. The first hard drive has failed.

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