SUMMARY
Detail regarding Unitrends support for green series drives such as Western Digital Green, Samsung EcoGreen, Seagate Barracuda Green, etc.
ISSUE
You are considering using Green drives for your UEB or Archive solution. Does Unitrends support Green drives?
RESOLUTION
Unitrends does not support the use of Green drives. You must use performance drives for UEBs and Archives that can handle high I/O.
After careful consideration and various tests, Unitrends concluded the use of Green drives is not recommended or supported.
CAUSE
Green drives uses specially programmed chips that vary the speed of the drive as well as the awake time between writes. This can save your some power and may not affect performance much on desktops, but in was not for designed for the high Input/Output demands involved in deduplication and the fast access and write needs of the LinuxOS.
Green drives spin down into a Power Save mode after 8 seconds of inactivity. This is not the case with Enterprise drives. Even standard Desktop drives have a wait time of 30 seconds or longer before it parks the head.
As the Linux OS does not have a way to spin up the drives before data is ready to land, using Green drives is very risky, and generally leads to data corruption.