what to do with 3 hard drives

[jonny75904]

I recently purchased 3 new WD cavier green 500gb drives with the intent of building a raid5 array and running linux. Admittedly I purchased without doing enough research and now I have serious doubts about running an os on raid5 with the onboard controller.

So now I am thinking I should run one drive as an OS drive and mirror the other two. I don't have a fourth drive unless someone can convince my wife I need a fourth after already buying 3....

Is it possible to have multiple distributions where ALL distros save their docs to the raid dives? That way I can wipe/install the os and keep my files? I seem to recall that I can be done, just need someone to point the compass.

Thanks!
Jonathan

[coopstah13]

the onboard controller is what is known as a fake raid. These don't really work that well with linux and even if it did, you are probably better off using mdadm and creating a software raid anyways.

[Rubberman]

I always use a non-raid drive for the system disc, and make a bit image of it when I update the OS. It is used for /boot, /, and swap. The other internal drives are allocated as a single LVM volume mounted as /home for user directories, source code, etc. Given the low cost of disc these days, reasonable backup procedures to an external hard drive (I use eSata-2 drives) is more cost-effective than RAID, IMO. In fact, with a quick-swap esata enclosure, I can use a hard drive just like tape. A 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm disc costs about $120 USD, including shipping. I can backup a lot of data with that.

[robert3353]

I recently purchased 3 new WD cavier green 500gb drives with the intent of building a raid5 array and running linux. Admittedly I purchased without doing enough research and now I have serious doubts about running an os on raid5 with the onboard controller.

So now I am thinking I should run one drive as an OS drive and mirror the other two. I don't have a fourth drive unless someone can convince my wife I need a fourth after already buying 3....

Is it possible to have multiple distributions where ALL distros save their docs to the raid dives? That way I can wipe/install the os and keep my files? I seem to recall that I can be done, just need someone to point the compass.

Thanks!
Jonathan

Hello,
you might want to do some reading concerning WD hd's in raid arrays. I have read several posts on the new egg dot com website as well as on other forums that I ran across after doing some Google searches about this issue that several people who have bought WD hard drives had major problems with them being used in raid arrays. It seems that WD have their lower cost drives, the green as well as the black series drives set up to randomly go into a deep sleep cycle that causes most raid controllers to drop the drive off of the raid, as if there were a drive failure. WD's respons to them had been that they never advertized these drives for raid array use and as far as they are concerned these drives are functioning normally. It seems that they want you to buy their really expensive enterprise series drives to be able to reliably use them in raid arrays. It seems with most of their competators this is not an issue, some of the posters commented that they switched over to Hititachi, or Fijitsu, or Segate drives in the same price range as the WD green or black series and never encountered any real issues in using them in a raid. Because of this I have purchased my last WD drive. I have never set up a raid up to now but I do not want to be prevented from doing so if I should choose to do so in the future.
Hope you find this helpful
Robert B

[cmiket]

Hello,
you might want to do some reading concerning WD hd's in raid arrays. I have read several posts on the new egg dot com website as well as on other forums that I ran across after doing some Google searches about this issue that several people who have bought WD hard drives had major problems with them being used in raid arrays. It seems that WD have their lower cost drives, the green as well as the black series drives set up to randomly go into a deep sleep cycle that causes most raid controllers to drop the drive off of the raid, as if there were a drive failure. WD's respons to them had been that they never advertized these drives for raid array use and as far as they are concerned these drives are functioning normally. It seems that they want you to buy their really expensive enterprise series drives to be able to reliably use them in raid arrays. It seems with most of their competators this is not an issue, some of the posters commented that they switched over to Hititachi, or Fijitsu, or Segate drives in the same price range as the WD green or black series and never encountered any real issues in using them in a raid. Because of this I have purchased my last WD drive. I have never set up a raid up to now but I do not want to be prevented from doing so if I should choose to do so in the future.
Hope you find this helpful
Robert B

Actually WD makes three types of drives Blue, Green, and Black. Black is the higher end model that is a little more expensive. From what I've read, the Black edition is what you want to run a RAID and they will do it without any problems. The green drives, like you mentioned, do go to sleep to conserve energy (hence the title Green). You should not have a problem running the WD Black in a RAID. The WD Black is my new hard drive of choice since Seagate's quality assurance has decreased dramatically on drives 1TB and up (horrible reviews everywhere).