I was in Fry’s Campbell a few days ago, and inquired which 1 TB Enterprise drives they carried.
They only stock one model, the $120 Samsung 1 TB HE103UJ-1113 RAID drive.
So I bought two drives and have been testing them in a Dell 2950/MD1000/Perc5E running CentOS 5.3 64-bit, and the latest Dell firmware as a RAID1 (mirroring) volume.
So far, so good …
The Samsung drives were recognized by the Perc5E BIOS, and Dell OpenManage and LSI MegaCli work fine. After configuring the RAID1 volume, I created an ext3 filesystem.
What’s really nice is that the Dell’s Perc vendor, LSI, officially supports the HE103UJ in their new 87xx/88xxx RAID controllers. So as long as the drives are reliable, LSI will likely continue to support and test them.
Here’s what omreport says:
$ omreport storage pdisk controller=1
[...]
ID : 0:2:0
Status : Ok
Name : Physical Disk 0:2:0
State : Online
Failure Predicted : No
Progress : Not Applicable
Bus Protocol : SATA
Media : HDD
Capacity : 931.00 GB (999653638144 bytes)
Used RAID Disk Space : 931.00 GB (999653638144 bytes)
Available RAID Disk Space : 0.00 GB (0 bytes)
Hot Spare : No
Vendor ID : DELL
Product ID : SAMSUNG HE103UJ
Revision : 1AA01113
Serial No. : S13VJ1KS600078
Negotiated Speed : Not Available
Capable Speed : Not Available
Manufacture Day : Not Available
Manufacture Week : Not Available
Manufacture Year : Not Available
SAS Address : 50022192C4394888
ID : 0:2:1
Status : Ok
Name : Physical Disk 0:2:1
State : Online
Failure Predicted : No
Progress : Not Applicable
Bus Protocol : SATA
Media : HDD
Capacity : 931.00 GB (999653638144 bytes)
Used RAID Disk Space : 931.00 GB (999653638144 bytes)
Available RAID Disk Space : 0.00 GB (0 bytes)
Hot Spare : No
Vendor ID : DELL
Product ID : SAMSUNG HE103UJ
Revision : 1AA01113
Serial No. : S13VJ1KS600079
Negotiated Speed : Not Available
Capable Speed : Not Available
Manufacture Day : Not Available
Manufacture Week : Not Available
Manufacture Year : Not Available
SAS Address : 50022192C4394887
$ omreport storage vdisk controller=1
[...]
ID : 6
Status : Ok
Name : vd15
State : Ready
HotSpare Policy violated : Not Assigned
Progress : Not Applicable
Layout : RAID-1
Size : 931.00 GB (999653638144 bytes)
Device Name : /dev/sdi
Bus Protocol : SATA
Media : HDD
Read Policy : No Read Ahead
Write Policy : Write Back
Cache Policy : Not Applicable
Stripe Element Size : 128 KB
Disk Cache Policy : Enabled
The results from hdparm are as expected for 2 SATA drives in a RAID1 volume:
$ hdparm -tT /dev/sdi
/dev/sdi:
Timing cached reads: 20896 MB in 1.99 seconds = 10485.84 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 360 MB in 3.00 seconds = 119.96 MB/sec
Update 2010-11-13: HE103UJ-1114 is also recognized.
Aventis Systems has used the Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5 TB “Desktop RAID” Drive
wikipedia.org: RAID
Moritz’ Perc5 Cheat Sheet
LSI MegaRAID Interoperability Report for 87xx/88xx Series, June 18, 2009
Careful with the “Disk Cache Policy : Enabled”. I think that means internal hard disk cache is enabled (ie. in the hard disk, not the disk controller). On some systems, the internal hard drive cache is *not* power down safe.
Ie., if you lose power during heavy write activity, pending writes in the internal hard drive cache never get written, possibly corrupting the disk (at least for the Hitachi drives I used).