March 3, 20179 yr Hi. So I was lucky enough to have my sister buy me a 4TB (Seagate ST4000dx001) hybrid drive as she knew a wanted an extra drive for my array. In the shop, she was told a hybrid drive was the best so bought this one for me. (what a great sister! ) Well being a hybrid drive this wouldn't work as an array drive. So I guess I could use it to replace my 512 gig SSD cache. But a 4tb cache drive seems a bit crazy plus it wouldn't be as fast as my SSD cache. An unassigned drive passed through to a VM and install an os on it is what I am thinking right now.What I am thinking is partition the drive to 2 x 2tb partitions and use first passed through to a windows VM and install the OS on that then use the second partition for something else. So what I am asking is what would you guys do with this drive. I guess I could just sell it and buy a normal 4tb drive for my array. So ideas, please??
March 3, 20179 yr 3 minutes ago, gridrunner said: Well being a hybrid drive this wouldn't work as an array drive. Why wouldn't this work as an array drive? I'm sure it would, but it would be a waste. No chance to return it and get a normal spinner?
March 3, 20179 yr Author I don't think it would work due to the SSD part. I think because the drive caches the most often accessed data on the NAND flash memory part of the drive, it would move data there itself so unRAID wouldn't be aware of this and therefore mess up the parity of the array. Do you think so? Or wouldnt make cache NAND flash make a difference to parity? But yeah, I may have to swap it as I haven't taken it out the packaging yet. Just rather not let sister know she bought the wrong thing! Edited March 3, 20179 yr by gridrunner
March 3, 20179 yr I would say that unRAID is addressing writes via the LBA. As long as every write gets its address, it doesn't matter if it is stored in the SSD part or on the platter. Parity will check the LBA for the appropriate bit and the drive will deliver it.
March 3, 20179 yr Add it as a second parity drive, and run for a little while. If non-correcting parity checks consistently come out clean for a decent period, I'd say you could be confident in using it as an array drive. I'd think it would actually be a quite competent parity drive, if it's designed well it would effectively negate the penalties for writing to multiple array drives at the same time until you ran out of SSD space. Definitely be worth playing with.
March 6, 20179 yr Author On 03/03/2017 at 8:11 PM, jonathanm said: Add it as a second parity drive, and run for a little while. If non-correcting parity checks consistently come out clean for a decent period, I'd say you could be confident in using it as an array drive. I'd think it would actually be a quite competent parity drive, if it's designed well it would effectively negate the penalties for writing to multiple array drives at the same time until you ran out of SSD space. Definitely be worth playing with. Thanks @jonathanm I will give that a try
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