Which Brand and Model of: 2TB Hard Drives, for usage in a Drobo, have you found to be the Quietest Hard Drives, the coolest and the most reliable, all at same time ???
Western digital Green power
WD20EADS
I’ve also had good luck with the WD Green drives, I have the same model but the 1TB version.
another vote for the WD20EADS
Slightly off-topic but you guys know your drives.
What about the WD20EARS
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=773
It has a 64MB cache instead of 32. Or is the cache not relevant when used in Drobos?
I just read that WD don’t recommend end-user drives in RAID or NAS.
If you are interested:
http://www.drobospace.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=1120
I have two Drobo v2’s with 4 WD20EADS in each. Working fine.
Yes, WD doesn’t recommend consumer drives for RAID or NAS, that’s partially due to potential for “fighting” between the RAID system’s error correction and the drive’s internal error correction causing timeouts (see TLER), and the other part is they want you to pay more money for the enterprise class drive.
DRI themselves have approved the WD20EADS for use in Drobo. Unless you have Drobo S or Drobo Elite, I don’t think you’re going to see any performance increase using an enterprise/RAID-class drive versus its consumer counterpart.
BHIGA- why the comment on ‘unless you have a Drobo S or Drobo Elite’? What I mean is, I wasn’t aware a difference existed between any of the Drobo family with regards to hard drives. Can you elaborate?
Thanks.
The Drobo S and Drobo Elite have faster processors than the other models.
As the real bottleneck on throughput for Drobo is the Drobo’s processing, the faster CPU should realize faster throughput.
and the pro - apparently that is faster with 7200rpm, so i can only image the elite is faster still
DroboS has eSATA which is 3Gbit so a theoretical maximum of say 300MBytes/second.
You won’t get that obviously 
DroboS is be limited by its processing power to more like up to 70MBytes/second read at most.
DroboPro has iSCSI which is 1Gbit Ethernet so theoretical maximum of say 100MBytes/second. I have seen reports of people 90MBytes/second on sequential reads.
DroboElite has iSCSI over Dual 1Gbit Ethernet - so theoretical maximum of say 200MBytes/second (with a couple of clients). Not sure of any benchmarks on this.
Personally I would only go for enterprise level hard disks for the enterprise model DroboElite.
plus there is a certain flaw in the logic on spending a relatively large amount of money on the elite - then skimping on the drives you put in it
If you want speed, I’d recommend this:
http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-speed-es-pro.cfm?featured=gsespro
We have two of these in work in RAID 10 (project drives), and then two DroboPro’s (secondary backup) and a 24TB Fujitsu Eternus SAN (primary backup).
yeah i dont want speed at all - its a blu-ray library - it needs to be able to hold 5MB/sec and im happy
5X Western digital black - 64MB cache
erm, im not really sure what that adds to the discussion? just naming a random drive and the fact that there are 5 of them somewhere?
the original poster asked for the quietest drives - which are not going to be 7,2000 rpm high powered drives
WD green - idle 24db, peak 29db
WD black - idle 29db, peak 34db
so what was your point?
Hello,
I am also in the market for a new drive. On the WD homepage I can see that they offer drives with 64 MB cache down to 16 MB
When do I need what? I have a Drobo 2nd gen. and use it for backups only.
Thank you
Siegfried
cache size makes no (noticable) difference (especially in “ordinary” (i.e. non-pro/elite) drobos), just get whatever is cheapest
Docchis,
thank you. I assume that 5400 or 7200 does also not make a difference on a normal Drobo
Siegfried
none 