Caviar Green WD20EARS in Raid array

Internal Drives WD Green
1

Afternoon everyone,

I have four of these in an external startech Esata enclosure. They are currently running RAID5. The box is storage for the HTPC so serves mainly HD films over Esata (this was a budget option over a dedicated NAS box).

I’ve read recently that these green edition drives are not perticulary good for RAID setups.

The issue i have is maintained write speed. Which on average is around 18mb/s.

And the maintained read speed which is around 30mb/s

Dismal.

I’m considering rebuilding the raid to raid0 for increased performance. I’m worried that the disks will then randomly drop out of the array, which they are not doing in radi5.

Basically, I’m asking if I should go with Radi0 for increased performance, or continue to put up with slow sustained speeds in exchange stable array?

Many thanks in advance!

2

If you want stable solution you should get a RE4 drives (RAID).  Unless enclosure manufacturer has a list with support on the GREEN drives then you again should go to a RE4.

Green drives are desktop drives.  You can try using it on RAID but you may encounter several problem in the way.