I have a server with a mix of Drives:

 

5 1TB 7200rpm segates

1 1TB WD10EADS

1 1TB WD10EARS

2 WB 1TB Caviar Black

1 500 GB Maxtor (to be replaced)

 

I am considering buying 2 new WD20EARS drives and making one of them my parity drive.

Are these drives suitable for a parity drive since they are only 5400rpm or will I hit another bottleneck before the drive speed becomes an issue.

My speeds aren't great right now anyway and I have a feeling the maxtor drive is one of the reasons.

 

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

Kent

Personally (and what I did a few weeks ago) is go with a faster drive for your parity.. I went with 2TB WD Black.

 

I notice a difference from the old 1.5Tb 5400 drive I had before. Obviosuly you will really only notice this when you are writing directly to the array. If you use a cache drive with user shares, you probably won't see much of a performance increase.

 

Those are my experiences from the past few weeks.

 

 

Since you already have a number of 7200rpm Data drives, you're probably better off going with a 7200rpm Parity drive too.

I went from a 7200 rpm parity disk to a WD20EARS a couple of months ago and have seen a drop from ~35 mb to 15~25 mb/sec when copying to my unRaid server.

 

I can live with it but next time I run out of space I'll get a 7200 rpm disk again.

Seagate's XT is still on sale:

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148506

 

I went from a 7200 rpm parity disk to a WD20EARS a couple of months ago and have seen a drop from ~35 mb to 15~25 mb/sec when copying to my unRaid server.

 

I can live with it but next time I run out of space I'll get a 7200 rpm disk again.

 

Did you jumper pins 7 and 8 on that EARS drive? The drop shouldn't have been as low as 15 mb/sec.

I've still seen >30mbps with an EARS for parity.

 

Peter

 

Yeah I normally see around 18-35MB with the EARS drive. I guess it depends on the phase of the moon and the tide for my changes of speed.

 

I can't hear it making a noise, which really is awesome

Did you jumper pins 7 and 8 on that EARS drive? The drop shouldn't have been as low as 15 mb/sec.

 

Hmm nope - didnt do anything to it....

 

After reading about the jumper I'll give that a try 

Be aware that some have experienced issues with placing the jumper on after the drive was already used, so read up on the possible solutions. Also, placing the jumper on destroys all data on the drive, which shouldn't be too bad since it's the parity drive. Once it's placed on and functioning, be sure to perform a full parity recalculate.

I'm using an EADS 2TB WD drive and I never get anything that low (15 MB/s). I'm averaging 28-33 MB/s on transfers. I'm currently planning on adding a Seagate 2 TB XT 7200 RPM drive to help with parity checks and then any random 500GB-1TB 7200 RPM disk I have laying around for a cache drive to help increase file transfer rates.

 

It seems strange to me that the transfer rates would actually be lower with the EARS. I would think that having double the cache on the drive would make it faster. At least by a bit...

I'm using a 2TB WD EARS as well, and I get normal speeds (25-35 mb/s).  Here's some more info on the jumper issue:

 

Advanced Format Drives

I have both EADS and EARS (jumpered) drives.  The EARS does, indeed, give a slightly better transfer rate.  However, I have now replaced the parity drive with a Samsung Spinpoint F3 (7200rpm).  I'm not sure about the power consumption, but the Samsung tends to run slightly cooler than the WDs!

but the Samsung tends to run slightly cooler than the WDs!

 

Samsung temperature reports are ALWAYS cooler than other drives!

In fact they are often cooler than the ambient temperature.

You should do a search on Samsung temperature reporting... 

Samsung temp reports are absolute crap. You need to add 5 to 10 C to them to get semi-accurate temps. To figure out what the offset is, you need to spin down all drives for at least half an hour, take the ambient room temp, then spin up the samsung drive, read the samsung temp, then subtract the samsung drive temp from the ambient room temp. That is your minimum offset that needs to be added to the temp it reports to get semi-accurate temps.

Crap is putting it mildly they are completely wrong. I would add 10deg to them.

Okay, having just spun up from rest, the EARS is reporting 33C, the EADS is reporting 32C and the Spinpoint F3 is reporting 30C.  The digital thermometer near the computer is reading 30C.

 

So, yes, the Samsung would appear to be under-reading, but only by 2 or 3 degrees!

Hello everyone.  I wanted to know for those with Ears drive do you have the bios set to AHCI or Sata as IDE?

AHCI.

 

That's the preferred setting. The IDE setting is obsolete and should be avoided if possible.

Okay, having just spun up from rest, the EARS is reporting 33C, the EADS is reporting 32C and the Spinpoint F3 is reporting 30C.  The digital thermometer near the computer is reading 30C.

 

So, yes, the Samsung would appear to be under-reading, but only by 2 or 3 degrees!

 

All my Samsung F2 drives are indeed off by up to 10C on the low side but my single F3 drive is much closer to reality. It may still be off by a few degrees but it's at least reasonable.