November 20, 201213 yr I just bought one of the new Western Digital 2tb Red NAS drives and plan to start using these from now on in my server given their improved reliability, warranty etc. I currently have a 2tb WD green drive as my parity disk along with some other WD green drives and some older, smaller 500gb disks as data drives (10 drives in total). I don't really want to add any more disks to my array at this point so I am looking at swapping in the new red drive somewhere. Would the best thing to do be to swap the red into the parity slot and then swap one of the old 500gb drives with the old green parity drive? Or should I just leave the green parity in place and use the red as a data drive instead? Both parity and data drives can be rebuilt in the event of a failure so I guess my question is around whether parity should be the most "reliable" disk in the array or not?
November 20, 201213 yr Both parity and data drives can be rebuilt in the event of a failure so I guess my question is around whether parity should be the most "reliable" disk in the array or not? IMHO, the parity is the LEAST important disk. If it fails, all your data is still intact and readable, and you can proceed to building parity on a new disk. If a data drive fails, ALL the other drives (parity included) must function perfectly to rebuild the failed data drive. Given those two scenarios, a second drive failure while running unprotected will lose 1 drive if the parity was the other failed drive, but both failed drives will be lost if the parity is still ok. tldr; Scenario: 2 failed drives. If they are both data drives, you lose all the data on 2 drives. If one failed drive is parity, you only lose the single data drive. Therefore parity is the least important drive.
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