Anyone know if there is a timeline for release of 1.5TB or 2TB hard drives suitable for RAID 5 or 6 arrays ?

And by that I mean no "green" junk that powers down the drives and makes them drop out of the array or having to mess around with TLER settings and praying they work and your controller does not mark all your drives as junk. For example, 3Ware does not have any of the 1.5 or 2 TB drives on its approved list for this very reason. You'd literally throw your away your entire array on the first "green" thing these drives did.

In short, I am looking for enterprise-type 7200RPM drives, especially those that can accept MAID commands from the controllers which spin the drives down but know they are still good and able to be powered back up quickly. Any info is appreciated.

Have you tried Google?

The WD Green drives don't just 'drop out' of an array. In fact, the new WD GP 1.5TB drives are "RE" models, meaning they are intended for RAID.

But even then, the GP drives probably don't have the performance you're looking for though, since they have variable RPMs... but I just wanted to point that out.

This is merely semantics, but if it is 'enterprise-type' drives you're looking for, you'd be looking for SAS, not vanilla flavored SATA. Let's call it what it is though: consumer grade drives intended for RAID. Obviously SAS wouldn't work here either, since the capacities are limited (320GB or so)

There is only one option (that I'm aware of) which is a true 7200 RPM drive (Seagate Barracuda), but it isn't an ES model (not intended for RAID). For that reason, I'm sure it does not support controller-based error TTL, suspend, resume and so on. As far as I know, SATA drives *intended* for RAID (Seagate ES, WD RE, Samsung F RAID etc..) are currently 1TB or less, with the exception of the new WD GP RE. Even finding a 7200 RPM drive that is above 1TB is a challenge: No 2TB drives exist and I can only think of one 1.5TB drive (That non-ES Seagate I mentioned earlier) that is actually 7200RPM.

Rick:

I appreciate your reply. I did not know about the WD GP series. I will have to check that out and see if 3Ware approves it.

Ahh...no wonder I did not know about the 1.5TB or 2TB models. They are virtually vaporware.

And WD does refer to the 2TB drive as enterprise class, so that is apparently not limited to SAS drives or WD just doesn't care. I consider enterprise class anything is appropriate for RAID, has highest MTBF and cycle ratings in its class, etc., not just SAS. I don't consider any "green" drive that does a bunch of hokey, arbitrary power-downs, sleeps, reduced RPM's, etc. to be enterprise class or appropriate for RAID.

I see 3Ware did just update their drive list in the last week or so, and the WB 2TB model you refer to is now approved. When I called the other week they did not recommend anything over a bunch of the 1TB models. Thanks again for pointing out that model. Hopefully we'll see some competition in that arena some day.

I hope so too. It's slim pickins out there.