zfs discuss - Jun 2010 - ZFS on Caviar Blue (Hard Drive Recommendations)

Hi list,

I googled around but couldn''t find anything on whether someone has
good or bad experiences with the Caviar *Blue* drives? I saw in the
archives Caviar Blacks are *not* recommended for ZFS arrays (excluding
apparently RE3 and RE4?). Specifically I''m looking to buy Western
Digital Caviar Blue WD10EALS 1TB drives [1]. Does anyone have any
experience with these drives?

If this is the wrong way to go, does anyone have a recommendation for
1TB drives I can get for <= 90$?

[1] http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=793

Thanks for any help,

-- 
- Patrick Donnelly

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 11:25 AM, Patrick Donnelly <batrick at
batbytes.com> wrote:
> I googled around but couldn''t find anything on whether someone has
> good or bad experiences with the Caviar *Blue* drives? I saw in the
> archives Caviar Blacks are *not* recommended for ZFS arrays (excluding
> apparently RE3 and RE4?). Specifically I''m looking to buy Western
> Digital Caviar Blue WD10EALS 1TB drives [1]. Does anyone have any
> experience with these drives?
We use a mix of WD Caviar Blue 500 GB, Caviar Black 500 GB, and RE2
500 GB drives in one of our storage servers without any issues.
Attached to 3Ware 9550SXU and 9650SE RAID controllers, configured as
Single Drive arrays.

There''s also 8 WD Caviar Green 1.5 TB drives in there, which are not
very good (even after twiddling the idle timeout setting via wdidle3).
 Definitely avoid the Green/GP line of drives.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com