cosmin wrote:
@RoofingGuy:
You do have a way of losing the big picture and you pick your subject as serve you better.
About your little curiosity… Please read WD Black specifications (bottom of page 1, Applications, second bullet)
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701276.pdf
“Desktop / Consumer RAID Environments - WD Caviar Black Hard Drives are tested and recommended for use in consumer-type RAID applications (RAID-0 / RAID-1).”
I think you’ll find this article from the official Windows Home Server Team Blog related to consumer/home RAID’s very enlightening: Why RAID is not a consumer technology
Most of the times, a consumer configuration means low end while Enterprise means high end. Any drive advertised for a consumer RAID is the same as not advertised for RAID at all, as the closest thing to a consumer RAID would be the software RAID, this is why the external RAID drives from WD (Sharespace, MBWII, MBSII, all use Caviar Green) can’t be set to a RAID anymore if you format all of the drives; it’s because they run a software RAID, not a hardware configuration…
Other than that, you can’t just compare the public specs of the Caviar Blacks and the RE3s and say than other than the TLER then the drives should just be dropped out and not dead. You can’t tell what do they look like INSIDE, the firmware they have, the manufacturing process, the materials used, the strain they were designed to take before the saturation point and fail…
Dude it’s way more than you think, all RAID (Enterprise) drives from all hard drive manufacturers are on a different level than the consumer drives. It’s like Toyota and Lexus; they are both cars with four wheels made from the same company, but you know that they are not on the same level. You can’t just compare them with the classical “Lexus is just an overpriced luxury Toyota” or in this case “The RE3s are just overpriced TLER Caviar Blacks”.
Caviar Blacks were NEVER Enterprise at any point of the past, just look at WD’s legacy drives section and you’ll see that they have had the RE’s from the start… RE, RE2, RE3, RE4, no Caviar Black there. Your immense back luck with WD drives is out of my understanding, there’s something wrong somewhere. But the last drive fails were to be expected if you were using them that way… Just look around here and you’ll know you’re not the only one who tried low end drives on a configuration that needs high end drives. You’ll note that it’s a shared story and results.
So many dead drives… I kinda feel bad for you, but I honestly don’t know what to tell you… :S