WD 2TB EARS Hard Drive at Zipzoomfly $124.99 After Rebate, Free Ship

[ohlwiler]

Note that this is EARS and not EADS

 

Rebate: $15

 

Use code: ZZF1049 for $10 off

 

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10011997&prodlist=search

 

Note: Code from techbargains

[chooch]

Does anyone know if these would make a good parity drive?  I really want to pull the trigger on this HD, but never quite understood what specs are important for unraid drives.  I wasn't sure if the 5,400 rpm speed of this drive is considered a negative factor and if it would slow down the transfer speeds if my other drives in the unraid server are 7,200 rpm.  Also, is there any benefit from the 64mb cache this comes with?  Most of my drives are either 16mb or 32mb so I was not sure if there would be a increase in performance from adding this drive.

[Joe L.]

Does anyone know if these would make a good parity drive?  I really want to pull the trigger on this HD, but never quite understood what specs are important for unraid drives.  I wasn't sure if the 5,400 rpm speed of this drive is considered a negative factor and if it would slow down the transfer speeds if my other drives in the unraid server are 7,200 rpm.  Also, is there any benefit from the 64mb cache this comes with?  Most of my drives are either 16mb or 32mb so I was not sure if there would be a increase in performance from adding this drive.

If all the other disks in your server are 7200 RPM disks then adding this as a parity drive would slow you down by as much as 1/3.

 

I'm going to guess the difference of 16MB vs 32MB is insignificant, since most access in a media server is sequential and most requests are for far more than the size of the internal buffer.