Is it better to have a fast parity drive?

[abs0lut.zer0]

Hey all

 

I have a question, i have read somewhere that the array is as fast as the fastest drives.

I realize the copies to the array will be as fast as the 5900rpm drive.

So if i have want to have only green drives 5900rpm's as my data drives, will it make a REAL difference if i have a 7200rpm parity drive ?

 

I am thinking that maybe parity checks will go faster?

or will it just really be a waste of electricity and a heater?

 

 

Thanks

[AlphaBravo]

For writes, you'd want the parity drive as fast as the fastest data drive. No real point in making the parity drive faster than the others though, unless you want to be prepared for faster data drives in the future. Paritychecking speed is pretty much limited to the speed of the slowest drive in the set, as each block needs to be read one by one.

 

A different consideration is in reliability of the parity drive. I guess opinions on this differ, I feel safer with an enterprise class drive for parity (I use a WD Raid edition), but Rajahal made a compelling argument against in another thread.

[lionelhutz]

It will make a difference. How real will depend on if you need it to make a difference or not.

 

I don't really care if the parity check takes 8 hours or 9 hours and I use the cache disk when writing big files so I just don't care about getting a little bit more array speed.

 

Peter

[StevenD]

I have a faster parity drive simply because I tend to do a lot of simultaneous writes. I also got a killer deal on my parity drive.  However, having that fast parity wont stop me from replacing it in the future with a 3TB model.

[kizer]

Personally I do all my work on my PC's and I wrote a couple of batch scripts that I run now and then on my windows machine when I want to copy/move things. Click, Click walk away and let it do its thing opposed to even caring when/how long something takes to move. Takes 60seconds to move something or even an hour I'm watching Tv in the other room anyways.

 

Many have reported even thou the idea is your array is only as fast as your slowest drive they have noticed some speed increases by having a faster parity drive.

[dgaschk]

A faster parity drive will help slightly if your writing to multiple data drives concurrently. It is no more important than any of the data drives and arguably less important because it does not contain data and its loss doesn't require a data drive rebuild.