Green hard drive users???

[Roadblock]

So whats the deal on FreeNAS using Green drives? I've seen mixed reviews about real hardware raid vs "fake RAID". And none specfically about freenas. I've got 4 WD 2TB Green drives... is there a real problem using them in FreeNAS, does it matter which version? What if i use FreeNAS 8 with ZFS instead of UFS??? Thanks for any advice or testimonials in advance?

 

[Durkatlon]

I've used WD Caviar Greens in two FreeNAS .7 systems for well over a year with no issues. I started building my FreeNAS 8 systems with Seagate Barracudas and did in fact have problems, and I'm now switching that build over to using WDs as well. These drives work fine with FreeNAS.

 

[matthewowen01]

i have several and they work great.

 

[Roadblock]

matthew whats your setup?

 

[matthewowen01]

i have 8 older 1 TB WD green drives in a raidz2, 4 1.5 TB WD green drives in a raidz2. i also have 6 2 TB seagate low power drives in a raidz2 as well.

as I've said many many times, i highly recommend raidz2 instead of raidz or stripped mirrors.

 

[Tekkie]

I've used 'green' drives in my Buffalo TeraStations for 4+ years running 24/7 all the time without a single issue, mind you these were 250GB drives and today's 2TB+ drives don't seem to be as well built.

I have already lost 3 drives (2xSamsung, 1xWD) in 2 months time...

 

[Bohs Hansen]

only thing to consider when using green consumer drives, is the spin/wake-up time. Depending on the multi-disk-volume-system used this can cause problems on some systems when they don't wake/spin-up fast enough from sleep. Else there shouldn't be much issues.

Btw, there are also enterprise green drives that are made to spin/wake-up fast enough for multi-disk-volumes