Which drives to get for new ReadyNas?

Kimius wrote:
PapaBear wrote: The consumer class drives are more prone to failure, but use in Raid5 use will not cause a failure. That's all I needed to know. Seems I will need to get some enterprise drives then.

Please note that I said "more prone", not prone. The enterprise class drives have also been known to fail, in fact if I recall correct there was one member wondering if his ReadyNAS was failing because he had suffered two failures out of four enterprise class drives, and was under the impression that they don't fail. Please understand, all drives are subject to failure. In fact, this acceptance of the fact that all drives will fail is why we have RAID with single and even double redundancy (an option in ReadyNAS units with 6 or more bays).

I for one am not convinced that enterprise class drives are cost effective in a home environment. In my example, I could have purchased 16 Seagate 1TB consumer drives for less than the cost of 8 enterprise class drives necessary to populate my two NVX units. I chose to purchase 10 instead, giving me two spares. Now, that I have started to upgrade the size of my disks, all those extra drives would be going to waste. Yes, I have suffered two drive failures, but I also purchased two spares. The refurbished drives I have received to replace the two failed drives will be put to other uses - maybe as a data drive in a PC.

I was able to buy 5 Hitachi HDS5C3030ALA630 drives for a total of $660. The first one came from Amazon for $140 and then Newegg had a sale so the final 4 cost me $520. If I were to have purchased 4 x 7K3000 the HUA7230303ALA640 it would have cost me $1400 ($350 each). (Note: Newegg lists the HDS5C3030ALA630 by its OEM PN 0S03230, but the photo of the top of the drive shows the model no. HDS5C3030ALA630 and that is the drive I received. For some reason both Amazon and Newegg are now listing the newer Hitachi drives by their OEM P/N as Hitachi uses an opaque anti-static bag with a printed label with the OEM PN and serial numbers listed. The OEM PN does not appear on the disk label).

You might also want to reboot the NVX and trigger the disk test from the boot menu when you reboot. This will take several hours to run.