Cooledspirit
Dabbler
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2012
- Messages
- 14
Hello,
I'd like to set up a FreeNas Z-Raid configuration. I have trouble selecting the hard drives (brand and type). I've read some threads on hard drives used and mostly the discussions are concerning WD's Green drives (I don't know if that's actually a good thing). I also know WD now has Red drives, that are advertised to be better compliant with NAS. I couldn't find much about other drives (maybe I looked in the wrong places).
Here come my questions:
Many thanks in advance for your valuable input!
Regards,
Cooled Spirit.
I'd like to set up a FreeNas Z-Raid configuration. I have trouble selecting the hard drives (brand and type). I've read some threads on hard drives used and mostly the discussions are concerning WD's Green drives (I don't know if that's actually a good thing). I also know WD now has Red drives, that are advertised to be better compliant with NAS. I couldn't find much about other drives (maybe I looked in the wrong places).
- The WD Green drives are cheap but have an aggressive park head time. They park already after 8 seconds of idle time. You can't disable APM for this drive as APM is not supported by this drive, so you need to use a tool called WDIdle3 (a DOS tool) BEFORE you build them in. I also heard that WDIdle3 might not work for all Green drives and that some people even have reported lower perfomance after an update performed by that tool on WD Green drives (don't ask me to confirm, this is just what I read on other places and threads). If WDIdle3 works, you can set it to 5 minutes instead of 8 seconds. These drives have 2 years warranty.
- The WD Red drives are more robust (better dealing with vibration and better MTBF), consume even less energy than the Green Drives and have numerous options, for example setting TLER and options involving parking the head and setting idle time. By default the option to park the heads is completely turned off, this is usefull for systems running 24/7. You again need this WDIdle3 tool to change this (although not listed by WD on the tools page for that type of drives). These drives don't have APM support either. Not to mention, these drives are more expensive. These drives have 3 years warranty.
Here come my questions:
- I read that for software raid, TLER is not relevant. Is that true ?
- I don't want my system to run 24/7, I want it to go into suspend mode (suspend to RAM preferably) when no activity happens after like 30 minutes. Suppose I would use the Red Drive and I want my system to go into suspend mode, I assume this means I need to enable parking of heads for the Red Drive?
- How does FreeNas manage energy? Meaning that the system goes in some sort of low energy consumption state and remain standby (I phrase it like this, because I don't know if suspend to ram can be configured like this for FreeNas or what possible alternatives are better).
- Are there decent hard drives (brand is not relevant) that simply have full support (APM yes/no) from FreeNas and don't require extra (DOS) tools but are simply fully managed by FreeNas (park heads, spin up, idle time, ....) ? By decent I mean: reliable in terms of life span, reasonable energy consumption, acceptable performance. I would take the WD Green or Red drive as reference for price, energy consumption and performance.
Many thanks in advance for your valuable input!
Regards,
Cooled Spirit.