Has anyone tried the WD AV series drives?

[jbuszkie]

I was looking at Newegg and it seems like western digital has a new line of
drives aimed at the AV (PVR) industry. They have Green Versions and
regular.. I'm wondering if they are worth the price?

Now I'm not so sure how new they are NewEgg didn't have any reviews yet suggesting they are pretty recent.

Now since I run in raid 5, maybe the enhanced streaming wouldn't help me? I'm sure the optimized for running 24/7 will though.

Has anyone had any experience with these at all?

Jim
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=7

[src666]

Originally Posted by jbuszkie

I was looking at Newegg and it seems like western digital has a new line of
drives aimed at the AV (PVR) industry. They have Green Versions and
regular.. I'm wondering if they are worth the price?

Now I'm not so sure how new they are NewEgg didn't have any reviews yet suggesting they are pretty recent.

Now since I run in raid 5, maybe the enhanced streaming wouldn't help me? I'm sure the optimized for running 24/7 will though.

Has anyone had any experience with these at all?

Jim
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=7

I have used the AV drives alongside greens, and I can't say that I notice much difference, but I do believe that the AV drives avoid the TCAL (Thermal Calibration) hiccups that you can get with the other low-end drives. I can say that I haven't had an AV drive fail yet, and have had several greens fail, but I only have a couple of AV's in service, so that's not a very big sample.

Over time, I have been migrating to higher quality drives. I've had too many failures, and too much time/pain spent in recovery, to think that saving a few bucks now is a good investment. In WD's product line, I won't go below the Black series, and prefer to use the RAID edition drives when I can afford them.

I wouldn't use the Green series for recording - they are meant to be low-performance, low-use drives, and aren't designed for a 24/7 always-on lifecycle. They _will_ fail a lot faster in that environment.

[jbuszkie]

Originally Posted by src666

I wouldn't use the Green series for recording - they are meant to be low-performance, low-use drives, and aren't designed for a 24/7 always-on lifecycle. They _will_ fail a lot faster in that environment.

WD make an AV green drive that is meant for 24/7 operation. I'm not sure it's worth the ~$30 extra for it.
I'm not concerned with the slower performance. I think for my simultaneous recording, the green will work just fine. And since I'm RAID protected, I'm not concerned with failure either.

I've had green drives in my unRaid Server for a couple years now and I haven't had any issues. Granted they do spin down... Whereas my Sage raid 5 probably spins 24/7. So when I replace my 4 750GB's in Raid 5 with 2 mirrored 2TB's green drives, I'll keep an eye on it.

[barney B.A.]

Originally Posted by src666

I wouldn't use the Green series for recording - they are meant to be low-performance, low-use drives, and aren't designed for a 24/7 always-on lifecycle. They _will_ fail a lot faster in that environment.

Then what's the point of green drives?

[Beefcake550]

Hey Buszkie....

I've been running with green drives (1.0, 1.5 and 2TB) now for about 3 years as they became available and haven't had any problems in my SageTV server. For the past two years, it's been serving up to 3 extenders and a Popcorn hour A-110.

I'm wondering why you went with RAID5 for a Sage server? I started this way, but did some testing and foudn that seperate spindles for multiple extenders is a better way to go in the case where you are recording and watching seperate, multiple shows. RAID5 jsut seemed to be a waste of some drive space, although I don't care if my recordings directory has an error. I am running WHS with all drives in the pool formatted to 64KB if that matters to you....

[jbuszkie]

I'm running raid because I want to be protected. We have a ton of recordings that I don't want to lose. If I lost a disk and all the shows on it, the wife and I would be very pissed! We also have all our ripped MP3s on there as well..

I trying to decide if I want to raid5 3 2TB disk for 4TB or if I want to mirror 2 sets of 2 drives for 4T storage. that's 4 drives vs 3 drives.
Rumor has it that Newegg will have a 2TB drive on sale tomorrow for $60! So maybe I'll spring for 4 of them...

Jim

[Beefcake550]

In the case of wanting proection on the shows, RAID makes sense. I'd even suggest using more drives in the RAID array to lessen the blow of losing available space vs. total space. Keep in mind that even after 3 or so years, drive replacement in RAID5 should be considered because as drives get that old, when one fails, the additional load on the others to rebuild the array can likely make another drive fail.

Good find on Newegg. If they do in fact for $60, I'm grabbing another 2 without thinking about it. I'd say get 4 anyway and then do a RAID5 on that....you'd get 6TB available instead of 4TB.

[jbuszkie]

yeah.. My current array is ~3 years old. That's why I'm looking to replace it.

I do like the idea of having two separate mirrored arrays vs 1 RAID 5 with more disks to spread the load out. Going forward there will be more HD streaming going on and I want to not have the disk be the bottleneck! In Theory right now I could be recording 2 HD QAM stations, 2 Firewire streams and 1 PVR-USB stream while streaming out to 1 HD200 and 1 HD300 and on the server as well.

I did look back at the mailer and it's $70 for the 2TB drives not $60.. I'll still probably get 4.

Jim

[Beefcake550]

that's an awesome price. can you PM the details on the drives? I get them but delete almost as fast.

[Beefcake550]

forget it... I see it.

[jbuszkie]

I think the sale starts at 1PM PST. So we have to wait till 4. I don't have any other details yet...

Jim

[Beefcake550]

gotcha...

on the RAID front....I've been using WHS with it's drive extender and have been happy with it once I started using "Drive Balancer"....a little tool I wrote to balance out data on the drives. Unfortunately, this has just been eliminated from Vail and I think the best solution will be some kind of RAID 5/6 array. I just hate the idea of individual volumes for each disk and having to worry about multiple sizes.

And to think I was about to sell of my RAID5 card on ebay.....think I'll hold onto that one now. Just wish it had more ports (I got an Areca 4 port PCIe card).

[Beefcake550]

Oh well, the 2TB drive for $70 is a Seagate drive. I've had bad luck with Seagate when they released the 1.5TB drives with problems. I will just to wait and see if the 2TB WD drives go on sale.

[jbuszkie]

Yeah.. I saw it didn't get too good of a review...

I might wait too.. How much does a 64M cache vs 32MB matter?

[jbuszkie]

They do have a samsung spinpoint 2TB for $80.. Maybe I'll just get those...

[Beefcake550]

I don't think the cache 32/64 makes much difference. The samsungs don't work in "non advanced sector" mode like the WD drives can. I am running WHS, so I have to stick with the WD drives as people have posted the Samsungs don't work in WHS very well.

If you are running Linux and a Windows OS which supports Advanced Format (4k) mode, go for the samsungs, they look like they have great reviews.

[jbuszkie]

I pulled the trigger! 4 - 2TB drives on the way!

Now I"ll just have to test to see if it can handle all my I/O in Raid 5 or if I have to switch to 2 - mirrored arrays....

[Beefcake550]

Nice....I think the answer to your question will depend on yoru controller. If it's a real hardware based RAID controller, you'll be all set. If not (like one built in to a motherboard), you'll be happier with the RAID0+1 setup.

Let us know!

[Fuzzy]

Any reason to not go with just 4 individual drives? That would actually be the best performance wise - Just think, if you DID lose a drive, you might potentially lose a quarter of your recordings... Though, the way MOST drives fail, you may actuall yjust lose them temporarily until you can copy the unaffected files off the drive. I can see the desire to have SOME form of RAID protection for archived media, but for recordings, I'm just not seeing the need.

EDIT: The samsung drives for $80 do look quite attractive though.. ;-)