Would I see a performance difference by going with a faster parity drive?


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From what I've read, it's recommended that your parity drive be your fastest drive. But what if all your data drives are the same? All of mines are WD Green 2tb drives. Would I actually see a benefit of using something faster (7200rpm drive) as the parity drive? I plan to have a 640gb WD Blue as my cache drive if that effects anything.

 

Also, I have two 1.5tb WD Green EARS drives lying around that I was going to use as data drives. Are there any issues with those? I've tried searching and the only issues I've read are about the 1.5tb samsungs.

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Possibly, but more times than not you will not see any performance difference.

 

It depends on usage patterns. If you're not doing multiple concurrent writes to different drives then odds are you will see little to no performance increases. If you're only writing data once and reading many times such as media streaming to playback movies or music then the parity drive is not in the picture at all since it's not used for reads (unless you're reading from a simulated failed drive).

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Possibly, but more times than not you will not see any performance difference.

 

It depends on usage patterns. If you're not doing multiple concurrent writes to different drives then odds are you will see little to no performance increases. If you're only writing data once and reading many times such as media streaming to playback movies or music then the parity drive is not in the picture at all since it's not used for reads (unless you're reading from a simulated failed drive).

 

That is exactly what I'll be using for. It's primarily going to be a media server, with the occasional backup image dumped into it.

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Worst case performance is based on rotational latency of the slowest disk involved. If you do concurrent writes to multiple disks a faster drive will help.

 

Ya, in theory....

 

It's been proven otherwise, ie changing from all EARS to a Hitachi parity increased the write speed. Once again, do a search and you'll find the information.

 

Still, something like 30Mbps to 35Mbps would be the more likely result.

 

Peter

 

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