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Recommended Drives for New Box


solrac3

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After testing and building, I have come to the junction where I will go for the drives...

 

I know that the PARITY drive should be fast and the biggest...

I know that the CACHE drive does not have to be as big but at least as big as the biggest upload I tend to make...

I know that the DATA drives have to be good and Power Savers...

 

My personal ideas (which are open to suggestions and critics) are:

 

WD SATAII BLACK 2TB for PARITY drive

WD SATAII BLACK 500GB for CACHE drive

WD SATAII BLUE or GREEN 2TB for DATA

 

I want to keep power down without sacrificing performance TOO MUCH... Longevity will be a plus... and temperature management too...!

 

So, what do you people recommend...?

 

HIT ME...!  :P

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I buy what is cheapest. Right now that is the 2T. EARS at Newegg for 80.99 (see the good deals forum). The increased speed of a 7200 rpm drive gains you very little in the unRAID world. Unless you plan to use the cache drive to run something like Sabnzbd, I would not buy a drive just for cache. Almost everyone, if they run a cache drive, use an old smaller drive.

 

That's my 2 cents.

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The faster parity would only help you if you routinely copy multiple sets of data to the array at the same time. If you have one disk that you use routinely and would like a small performance boost when writing to that disk, buy 2 7200rpm drives and use one for parity and one for data. Otherwise go with green drives all around.

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OK... I see a line here...

 

Giving away the Black HDD's idea, what about Blue Drives for Parity and Cache and Green EARS for DATA...?  :-\

 

PARITY and DATA

 

As I said before, a 7200RPM parity only helps in 2 situations ...

1 - When you are writing to a 7200RPM DATA disk

2 - When you are writing to two data disks at the same time (even if they are green data disks)

 

If you don't plan to have ANY 7200RPM data disks, that takes away advantage #1.

 

So how often to you plan to do #2?  For most people, this is a rare event.

 

So I'd suggest that you either plan to get one fast data disk that you put your most frequently written data on (maybe your backup disk), and get a fast parity disk.  Or just get all green disks.  If you're using a cache disk, I suggest sticking with green parity and data.

 

 

CACHE

A faster cache disk has no advantage when writing over the network.  The network is the bottleneck not the drive.

 

And a faster cache disk no advantage when moving data to the protected array overnight.  The write speed of the array is your bottleneck.

 

The only time a faster cache comes into play is if you are running OTHER things on the unRAID server.  Like transcoding video, verifying par sets, unraring files.  If you are doing these things go with a 7200 cache disk.  If not, it doesn't matter. 

 

Many users here don't even have cache disks because the write performance to the array is decent and the lack of protection on the cache disk adds risk.  But that's a decision for each user to make.

 

Personally I'd make the cache disk identical to your data disks.  With a new array you'll be doing lots of writes for a while.  But as time wears on your write activity will slow down and you'll use the cache disk less and less and want to convert it to a protected disk in the array (or else use it to replace a failed disk).

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Again, I agree with the above.  If you are buying a new drive to act as a cache disk, make it identical to your parity/data disks so that it can double as a warm spare.

 

Also, if you use a cache drive the #2 benefit of a faster parity drive also disappears.  So if you are planning on using a cache drive, there's absolutely no benefit to having a faster parity drive.

 

So go green all around :)

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Remember to jumper all WD EARS drives BEFORE installing them in your server (pins 7-8).  Installing the jumper should be the first thing you do after you remove the drive from the package.

 

Avoid Samsung F4s.

 

I would also recommend avoiding Seagate LPs, since upgrading the firmware is a pain.  Your call, though.

 

Also, space out your drive purchases as much as possible (basically, don't buy them until you need them, or at least don't buy them until you catch them on sale).  If you must buy several drives at once, try to buy them from different vendors.  This decreases your chances of getting a bunch of bad drives from a single defective batch.  The chances of this happening are slim, but it is worth the extra effort and $5-10 in shipping in my opinion.

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Persistence is key ;)

 

solrac3: Yep, that's what I would do.

 

The Warm Spare can also act as a 'Tepid Spare' (see here for an explanation) which will give you some breathing room to wait for the next hard drive sale.  That way you should never have to pay full price for a drive, even when you are technically out of space.

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So a good starting point would be:

 

3 EARS:

 

   1 PARITY = 2TB

   1 CACHE = 2TB (HOT SPARE)

   1 DATA =  2TB (waiting for future needs to grow)

 

If you're okay with that, it should be fine. Personally, I don't use a cache drive at all. I may later on, but mostly to act as a warm spare. I just copy stuff in the background via teracopy, and let it go. If I were only buying three drives to start with, I'd personally forgo the cache drive in order to get another data drive.

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