Parity 5400RPM drives vs 5900RPM


kizer

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I recently swapped out my WD Greens that normally ran in the 5400rpm range to Iron Wolves that run around 5900rpm. 

In my Array I have a 10 Sata Port Motherboard so I'm direct plugged in. 

 

My reasoning for doing some drive swapping was simply my drives where dated. 2TB's, 3TBs and lots and lots of hours. I was on a quest to find something that I felt was at a really reasonable price point, reliable and available during this Covid Pandemic.

 

So out with the older drives and I spent some time Swapping out 2's and 3's with some 4TB Iron Wolves across the board. During this swap I reduced my used ports from 10 all used which included my Parity and Cache to 8 used, which means I have two spares. Sure I could of gone with larger drives, but I just kept it simply like I have since the day I started playing with unRAID. Use what you need not what you might need in a year or two. Worst case I swap out the Parity with a 6TB or larger and do the same with any drives I might need to later. 

 

So in the end I went from all drives spinning at 5400 to 5900.

Old setup around 12hours and I think I averaged 80 MB/s

New Setup. 9hours and an average of 119.8 MB/s

 

Sure its not ground breaking, but I'm kinda blown away that 500rpm and newer tech drives makes that big of a difference. I could only imagine what switching to 4TB 7200rpm drives would of delivered. ;)

 

https://hdd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/WD-Green-2TB-2011-vs-Seagate-IronWolf-4TB-2016/1850vs3906

 

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3 hours ago, JorgeB said:

It's not just the RPMs, the less different sizes you have in the array the faster it will be for a check/rebuild.

 

Never thought about that honestly for Checking. Totally makes since with regards to rebuilding. 

 

3 hours ago, itimpi said:

There is also the fact that with newer drives the packing density may be higher so that more data can be read in a disk revolution.

 

That I did know about. I just assumed newer Tech and Caching would help in a lot of cases. 

 

All I know for sure is I'm rather impressed with swapping out the older drives. Seems to bring in new life to "The Old Server" ;)

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In my Unraid I use all 10TB WD White (WDC WD100EZAZ-11TDBA0), I have one parity and five data disks so far.

 

With my setup parity check speed is usually about 150MB/s, yesterday when it last ran it looked likethis:

Duration: 18 hours, 50 minutes, 32 seconds. Average speed: 147.4 MB/s

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On 2/2/2021 at 2:22 AM, gberg said:

In my Unraid I use all 10TB WD White (WDC WD100EZAZ-11TDBA0), I have one parity and five data disks so far.

 

With my setup parity check speed is usually about 150MB/s, yesterday when it last ran it looked likethis:

Duration: 18 hours, 50 minutes, 32 seconds. Average speed: 147.4 MB/s

 

Interesting. So your running 7200rpm drives. Much larger as well. 

 

None scientific numbers based on info in topic which does not account for drive size miss matches, controllers or age. Just rpms noted:

5400 = 80MB/s

5900 = 120MB/s

7200  5400 10TB = 150MB/s

 

Sure none of this is new at all and is rather old news since people have been running faster drives for years. Just food for thought and since I've been running power sipping gear for years I've slowly embraced the I have the power lets go faster and more powerful. 

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14 hours ago, kizer said:

 

Interesting. So your running 7200rpm drives. Much larger as well. 

 

None scientific numbers based on info in topic which does not account for drive size miss matches, controllers or age. Just rpms noted:

5400 = 80MB/s

5900 = 120MB/s

7200 = 150MB/s

 

Sure none of this is new at all and is rather old news since people have been running faster drives for years. Just food for thought and since I've been running power sipping gear for years I've slowly embraced the I have the power lets go faster and more powerful. 

 

No, my drives are 5400rpm, they are WD White (WDC WD100EZAZ-11TDBA0) shucked from WD My Book.

 

I guess there is more to it than just the rotation speed of the drives, and the main factor probably is as itimpi said that the larger capacity the drive have the higher the desnsity of the drive is, and therefore it reads/writes more data per revolution, and then I imagine the disk controller have something to do with it too?

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9 hours ago, gberg said:

 

No, my drives are 5400rpm, they are WD White (WDC WD100EZAZ-11TDBA0) shucked from WD My Book.

 

I guess there is more to it than just the rotation speed of the drives, and the main factor probably is as itimpi said that the larger capacity the drive have the higher the desnsity of the drive is, and therefore it reads/writes more data per revolution, and then I imagine the disk controller have something to do with it too?

 

Now I'm really curious. Lol 

It is what it is, but that's crazy. Totally could be plater density for the win on this one. I just assumed when I looked up Western Digital White they was 7200. 

 

I wonder if its your controller card. I'm running mine directly off my Motherboard. I do have that same card, but I'm currently not using it. Might be a time to experiment. 

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Platter density does more for performance than RPMs, there are 5400rpm drives cables of 200MB/s+ (on the outer sectors), older 7200RPM drives can be much slower than that, obviously if you compare same density with different RPMs the 7200rpm wins, e.g.:

 

Older WD Green/Red/Blue that used 1TB platters, like 1, 2, 3 and 4TB models, speed starts at around 150MB/s and ends at around 80MB/s.

Toshiba P300, same 11TB platters @ 7200rpm speed starts at 200MB/s and ends at around 100MB/s.

 

 

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