Hi! I just watched episode #80 of know how, and you talked about the difference of drives for a...

[G+_Björn Rhoads]

Hi!

 

I just watched episode #80 of know how, and you talked about the difference of drives for a NAS.

 

There is one more very important difference, and that is in the firmware.

The baracuda and the green drive have firmware for being used as a standalone drive, which means it will try alot harder to recover a hard to read sector.

However if that takes too long and make the drive to timeout, most operatingsystems will drop the disk from the raid and mark it faulty.

 

On the flipside, the red drive will fail faster for a block letting the raid software to write good data again. But less trying to fix a sector also means increased chance of loosing data if the disk is used standalone.

 

Just my 2c

[G+_Björn Rhoads]

There is a good article on AnandTech on the difference of drive types for those that want to read a bit more on the subject.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6157/western-digital-red-review-are-nasoptimized-hdds-worth-the-premium/

 

Just wanted to add a source that is at least for me trustwothy

[G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ]

Great info! Thanks. :)

[G+_Gary Brooks]

Agree, although I believe this matters less with a software raid (raidZ (5), Z2(6)) solution than a hardware one as ZFS will allow for the extra time. I would also if at all possible spring for ECC memory to avoid the chance of scrubbing bad data into my array.

[G+_Gary Brooks]

You can also use something like this for your boot flash... http://uk.transcend-info.com/images/industry/products/Img_Flash_USB-Module_USB_Flash_Module_V_02.jpg