Good day all,

 

I've recently (in the last 2 months or so) been introduced the wonderful world of Unraid... seriously, where have you been all my life??!! After watching a lot of Youtube videos, buying a new case (Fractal Design Define R5), and doing some hard drive planning, I'm almost ready to buy the license and get on with this build which will be primarily a Windows 10 VM with a Plex server "behind the scenes". I do have one question though regarding hard drives specifically the WD Purple drives.

 

A few years ago I bought a 4TB WD Purple with the sole purpose of setting up a home surveillance system. Not to get into the details, the project never went ahead and I have a brand new drive waiting to be used. For the purposes of my Unraid server, I'll be putting in the following drives:

• 4TB WD Red (brand new)
• 4TB WD Purple (brand new)
• 3TB WD Red (RMA from WD, brand new)
• 500GB NVMe Samsung 970 EVO (primary drive for Windows 10 VM)
• 250GB Samsung 860 EVO (cache drive)

 

I've looked through the forums here to see if this question was asked/answered and did not find a solid answer. I've seen that people said that any hard drive would work with Unraid and really the limitations will be read/write capabilities of non-NAS specific drives.

 

My question is: Should I use the WD Purple drive as my parity drive or leave it as part of the array?

Likely won't make much (if any) difference but since surveillance drives are optimized for write intensive workloads I would probably use it as parity.