5400rpm or 7200 hitachi 3tb drive?

[intertan]

so I am looking at 3tb drives now that they are beta supported. I have found 2 one at 5400rpm and the other at 7200rpm. Now the 5400 rpm has a 32mb cache the other says nothing for cache. using an i3 2100 would the 7200 rpm make a big diffrence? $50 diffrence in price

[SSD]

If both your parity disk and your data disk are both 7200 RPM, you will get a little boost in write performance.  Depends on what you use your array for. But if copying a file to your array in 8-9 minutes rather than 10 minutes makes a big difference to you, then the $50 is justified, especially if you already have a bunch of 7200RPM drives.

 

But you have to weigh the small write performance boost against the extra cost, extra heat generated, and extra power required to run the faster drive.

 

Most users opt for green drives.

[Johnm]

I would go with the 5400 personally for unraid.

 

As mentioned, you would get a slight performance boost at a higher cost of $$$, heat and power... You can always pick up a small 7200 cache drive to offset that speed if you wanted.

 

Plus, if you are saving $50 a drive, you could then get 4x 5400's for about the same cost of 3x 7200's.... The extra 3TB would probably be better in the end IMO.

[TODDLT]

Sorry to chime in on someone else's thread here, but I was about to post a similar question about drive speed and this may answer it for me.

 

So is there no difference in read speed between 7200 and 5400 drives?

[Joe L.]

Sorry to chime in on someone else's thread here, but I was about to post a similar question about drive speed and this may answer it for me.

 

So is there no difference in read speed between 7200 and 5400 drives?

Basically, you are limited by the LAN speed when reading, not the disk's rotational speed.

[TODDLT]

Sorry to chime in on someone else's thread here, but I was about to post a similar question about drive speed and this may answer it for me.

 

So is there no difference in read speed between 7200 and 5400 drives?

Basically, you are limited by the LAN speed when reading, not the disk's rotational speed.

 

What about reading mulitiple files at the same time (IE streaming two HD BD ISO's)?  Does seek time affect this ability for the drive to bounce back and forth between multiple large files and is this improved on a 7200 RPM drive, or is the read time so fast anyway that it woudlnt matter?

[Joe L.]

Sorry to chime in on someone else's thread here, but I was about to post a similar question about drive speed and this may answer it for me.

 

So is there no difference in read speed between 7200 and 5400 drives?

Basically, you are limited by the LAN speed when reading, not the disk's rotational speed.

 

What about reading mulitiple files at the same time (IE streaming two HD BD ISO's)?  Does seek time affect this ability for the drive to bounce back and forth between multiple large files and is this improved on a 7200 RPM drive, or is the read time so fast anyway that it woudlnt matter?

Seek time and buffer size would be the biggest factors.   Substantially though, we can read a disk at 100MB/s and most media playback is 1/10th to 1/20th of that or less.