What is the difference between normal data hard drives and Raid Ready Hard Drives?
I am planning to build a server with 6x2TB hard drives and i have been quoted raid ready Hard drives nearly at 250$ per 2 TB hdd, what is the advantage of going for these over lets say 70$ 2TB Hard drives.
I am planning a file server for a small office round about 20-> 30 people Maximum no big files mainly documents and then overnight backup of some VMware images.
I am looking for the most cost effective way to do this. should i really invest in "raid ready" hard drives or is it just a marketing act.
My Provider of the parts told me if i go for standard hard drives " you will risk compromising data integrity" is this true?
thanks in advance.
Answer
RAID drives typically are of a higher quality but also have different error handling characteristics.
There is a good article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery which describes the Western Digital feature although similar features apply to the major disk manufacturers
From the WD web site...
When an error is found on a desktop edition hard drive, the drive will enter into a deep recovery cycle to attempt to repair the error, recover the data from the problematic area, and then reallocate a dedicated area to replace the problematic area. This process can take up to 2 minutes depending on the severity of the issue. Most RAID controllers allow a very short amount of time for a hard drive to recover from an error. If a hard drive takes too long to complete this process, the drive will be dropped from the RAID array. Most RAID controllers allow from 7 to 15 seconds for error recovery before dropping a hard drive from an array. Western Digital does not recommend installing desktop edition hard drives in an enterprise environment (on a RAID controller).
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