thejtiggidy

Ok, well here it is. ASUS P7H55M-PRO / I3 550 / 4 GB 1 x WD2002FAEX 2GB (Black) 5 x WD15EAD/RS 1.5GB (Green) Gigabit Ethernet - Jumbo frames - No utilization I was transferring a 7GB MKV. I was writing to a single drive that was empty. After the new parity drive was installed.. I deleted that single file and recopied the very same file to the same drive. My benchmark was copying this one file in both situations repeatedly using teracopy and logging my throuput and timing. Again I dont understand where the logic came from that a faster parity drive doesnt make a difference; it seems flawed to me. What I think is more accurate is every drive that is involved in a write impacts performance and they are NOT directly linked to eachother. The writes are not congruent; they are utlimately a series of events, any increase in performance in one of the steps along that series nets some gain in the end. Just as you have stated in your response, you get different results with different sets of drives. If the parity and data write were in lock step with eachother you would not see any performance gain amongs any set of drives as your parity drive would dictate your performance for all of them equally. So basically your experience confirms that it fact makes a difference. I am not saying that my results are the holy grail and backed by intesive testing and documentation. But, I wish this "limitation" had not been so overstated and protrayed repeatedly as a forgone conclusion as I would have gone with a faster parity drive in the first place; saving me some time and frustration. I am new to the forums so I am not familiar with the discussions around this topic but I fee like this is kind of like global warming... once enough people believe, it becomes fact; regardless of the actual results. I am sure there are situations and methods where the benefit is greater or less significant but again... it is not black and white and certainly not a fact that it makes no difference.

I personally dont care for the CPU and memory layout of that board. Seems pushed so far back toward the drive's that it will make things difficult to manage as well as eliminate the potential for simple passive cooling. It is also overly expensive for your needs if your not going to use ECC memory. Slipstreams? Junk! Do you really want to trust your data and drives to a sleeve bearing with 30,000 hr mtbf? Go with a noctua, noiseblocker, s-flex or something with a quality bearing so you can sleep at night! I went OCD on fans for like a month when I built my last box and I bought one of every fan out there. Personally, noiseblockers are it for me... but they are spendy. Noctua are nice too, great bearings but I like to slow them down a bit. I have noctua nf-p12's in my unraid running 50% and they are extremely quiet and push plenty of air.

I have read numerous times in the forums that having a faster parity drive makes no difference and that writes are only as fast as the drive your writing to, yada yada. It never really made absolute sense to me because without parity you can obviously write much faster. Why would you be limited to 25-27MB/s with drives that are easily capable of much more... there is at least a chance for a gain here! I emailed Tom for his insight and he basically said the jury is still out and give it a shot; so I did. I replaced my WD15EADS parity drive with a WD Black 2002FAEX 2GB and it has made a huge difference. I was getting about 25-28 MB/s before the switch; immediately after I get 33-35 MB/s and sometimes even up to 40. No other hardware was changed! I now run 1 x WD2002FAEX parity and 5 x WD15EAD/RS' it was worth the extra dough! Anyway, I was on the fence... if you are too I say go for it!

That's some serious resolution.. a bit more than necessary for a 55" display! Guess I will have to buy a 10' set I cant wait!

I agree with uncompressed. I am here in these forums because I need copious amounts of storage to keep my uncompressed bluray collection. Disk space is cheap.. I spent good money for AV equipment so I could enjoy movies in all of their glory. The previous poster makes a good point.. TV's are getting better and you may want the higher resolution. But, eventually the standard is going to change and we will all be doing this again at 1450p or whatever the standard ends up being. I use makemkv because its quick, simple and uncompressed. I also dont have any issues with the sound being off.

I am extremely happy with my Sandybridge i7 2600k and MSI H67MA-ED55. The Sandybridge IGP's playback is flawless and reencoding is excellent. It also runs extremely cool and average core temps are around 20C... I have a Antec Fusion 430 with a Scythe Ninja Mini passively cooled by two Noiseblocker M12-S2's at 50% in the case fan locations and they are dead silent. It's probably a bit overkill for my purposes but I always like to err on side of over powered so I never wonder "if I had". Besides, it is cool, quiet and resonably priced. Abolutely LOVE it; aside from Intel's Cougar point recall... oh well no big deal.

I thought that the EADS was the replacement for the EARS? My local Micro Center was out of the 1.5 EADS so they gave me EARS for the same price $64 bucks. They also told me that they will no longer be carrying the EADS. I then went to NewEgg and they show it as deactivated also. I thought it was no big deal because I can jumper the EARS and ultimately be the same drive with 64mb cache. It doesnt seem so My EADS's cleared much faster and they also formatted faster. I havent moved any data over yet to know if the EARS is truly slower or not; I hope they are not because I cant get any more EADS'. I would have just rather had all EADS' because they just work and you dont have to pull the jumper crap. Odd!

Lol... I just posted it again in the General Support forum. You can delete it if you like. I did a search and didnt find anything

I dont know if this has been posted here before or not but this information is extremely valuable for folks like us! The temperature data is extremely interesting. Cooler is NOT alwyas better... at least below 30c. Had to move my unRAID box upstairs and slow down my fans as I was running at 17c! I still cant break 27c with my greens but oh well, I cant slow my fans down any further. Definately worth the read! Original publication labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf Less verbose to the point version http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/ So I guess it was a hot topic here before Oh, well its back for more!

So there was a study done by the google and its quite interesting stuff. By their own admission the data is just not there on power cycles because most of their hardware is running 24/7. Nevertheless it is really interesting; especially the temperature data. It has prompted me to bring my server from the basement and slow down my fans! Turns out cooler is NOT better, in fact its much worse! Hot is also not good but it seems to be much less of a factor. 35-40 seems to be the sweet spot. labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

So I used this calculator at http://www.electricity-usage.com/Electricity-Usage-Calculator.aspx Device Name: WD20EADS x 6 Wattage of Device: 20 watts - Higher than it actually is. WD20EADS = 3 watt idle Kilowatt Hour Cost: .08 cents Hours of use per day: 24 Cost Per Hour: $0.001660 Cost Per Day: $0.039840 Cost Per Week: $0.279 Cost Per Month: $1.12 Cost Per Year: $14.50 Given that the drives will be in use at least some of the time over the course of a year... I can only save something less than $14 bucks in a whole year... yeah I am leaving spin down off! I firmly believe a drive is better off always running vs spin up/down cycling.

Just curious what people have noticed with Indexing windows libraries running on shares located on unraid. Basically to take advantage of all of my musics metadata indexing needs to be enabled and it seems windows access' it quite often. What have you noticed with this... does windows actually access files that you have indexed forcing your drives to spin up? I would consider spinning down my drives if I didnt think that indexing was going to spin them up randomly and excessively.

I think PVR's are much different than a drive spinning in idle. PVR drives are hammered away at 24/7 and the armature is likely the failing component in 9 out of 10 drives. I probably should have worded it better or provided another option, I will edit it slightly. @Hanabi - Not to get down to brass tacks but the spin up time for most 2tb drives is closer to 12 seconds according to many manufacturer specs; which seems to be longer than what it actually is. I would like to konw what the drives power requirements are when spun down. Regardless, you are correct, I over stated it for theatrics but still... when you factor the difference in and the low power requrement at idle for most drives power savings is pretty insignificant overall. So far I cant believe I am the only one that does not spin down.. this really surprises me. The question I really wanted to pose was; what is worse for a drive, running all of the time or spinning up and down cycles.

What are your feelings on Spin down? In my experience a drive that stays running stays running; I have had drives run continuously for 8 years! Conversely, I have replaced a lot of drives in machines for people who shut them down. My logic is this; the load on the spindle motor and its control circuit is greatest during spin up; far more than spinning in idle. This increased load repeated over and over again wears the motor and or circuit out quicker IMHO. When running 24/7 the bearings on the other hand never get a break; which honestly I can't say I have ever seen be the demise of a drive other than being so loud I just retire it. I have on the other hand, thrown out a lot of drives due to the click of death which I usually attribute to the motor circuit having failed. The other big issue for people is power consumption. I imagine this can vary greatly based on the number of drives and the drives themselves. In my situation I use 6 WD green drives that have a quite low power draw; 2.5 watt at idle I believe. The question is what are you really saving? The spin up power consumption of most drives is 12 to 14 watts vs. the idle consumption of 3 to 6 watts. So, basically if you end up spinning up drives all of the time you could be costing yourself more money <== Ok, maybe a little over stated But in my mind the math just is not there for significant power savings when accounting for increased spin up load and the fact that we are talking a few watts per drive. For me, 20 watts is a drop in the bucket compared to my overall power consumption. Sure if you’re running 22 WD Blacks it could add up but you would be the exception. Another area of concern is heat. In my opinion if you have heat issues, spin down is not the solution. If you base your cooling situation on drives that are spun down… what happens if the all spin up? In my opinion a properly executed cooling system should eliminate any of these concerns. I live in Minnesota and my server is in the basement… at the moment 16°C drive temps at idle are a bit on the low side Last, is the wait time for spin up which there is not much to say, it sucks. Sure you can adjust directory caching and whatnot but still... you have to wait sometime. So, what are your opinions and experiences? What do you think is worse for a drive.. running 24/7 idle or spin up/down cycles.