January 25, 201115 yr Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive Promo Code: EMCKJHE85 ($10) MIR: $20 (expires 1/31/2011) Usual caveat: Need to sign up for newsletter for promo code to apply. Don't forget the jumper if you're on an older unRAID build. Edit: Rebate is good for up to 5 drives and promo code will apply to multiple drives in a single purchase.
January 25, 201115 yr Is this still worth considering if my parity (2TB) and my data drives (1TB and 2TB) are 32MB/7200 RPM? I was going to upgrade a few of the 1TB drives to 2TB, but was not sure if should keep them all the same speed. If I only use the server for media (movies, music, etc) will I ever see a benefit of the 64MB cache? I have been waiting for the 2TB Hitachi 32MB/7200 drives to go on sale again but it has not happened recently. I was going to get the Hitachi external drive that was posted a few days ago, but the 1yr warranty worried me and I was not sure if they would even honor that if I opened up the case.
January 25, 201115 yr Yes, I think it is worth it. If all you ever do is store and stream media from your server, the green drives are plenty fast enough. If I were you, I would be taking the opposite approach - slowly replacing your 7200 rpm drives with green drives to save on power and heat. The drive's cache size rarely matters since we are generally transferring files well over 64 mb in size.
January 26, 201115 yr Well, I never really had an approach I guess. Just so happened the Hitachi's were good deals so I jumped on them. I have no problem using green drives and will makes those the parity and data drives I access the most, and then make the 7200 RPM drives the ones I don't access as often. I did have a newbie question about these drives. After reading the 19 pages here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5384.270 I still am not sure exactly what needs to be done to these drives before installing. I am pretty sure I should jumper 7-8 before installing, but is that all I really need to do? Or do I need to run pre-lclear (not sure why, but it was mentioned a lot) as well. I am currently running version 4.6, but plan on upgrading to 4.7 since they just released a stable version. Thanks in Advance.
January 26, 201115 yr 4.7 stable was just released, so I would recommend upgrading to that and forgetting about the jumpers. Just install the WD EARS drives just like you would any other drive. Preclear is optional but highly recommended for ANY new drive.
January 26, 201115 yr What about jumpered drives already in the system with an upgrade to 4.7 - leave alone? Remove jumper?
January 26, 201115 yr Leave them alone. There's no benefit to removing the jumper, you'll just cause yourself headaches.
January 26, 201115 yr Preclear is optional but highly recommended for ANY new drive. Thanks for the info. I never ran Preclear before, so this is new to me.
January 26, 201115 yr Leave them alone. There's no benefit to removing the jumper, you'll just cause yourself headaches. Thanks - I see that in the 4.7 release notes: "If you have formatted an EARS drive with a previous version of unRAID or Windows with the jumper in place, we recommend you leave the jumper in place and do not re-format the drive; just treat it as a non-AF drive. There is NO performance penalty for doing this!"
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