Best Use of WD Purple

[bsimonian]

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?

[JorgeB]

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.