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Question

TB drives VS 500GB Drives in RAID?

May 27, 2011 11:12AM PDT

I'm building a NAS server and was wondering would my RAID config have a faster read/write speed with larger 1TB drives x4 orr smaller 500GB x6 ?? Basically is it faster to have more smaller ones or fewer larger ones?

Discussion is locked

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Answer
If only it was that simple.
May 29, 2011 8:15AM PDT

In theory more drives is more speed but most of the time it's a fool's errand because the NAS's connection speed is a fraction of even a single SATA drive.

But you will encounter folk that will not think about that and feed the makers of such gear.
Bob

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Sneeky
May 30, 2011 10:09AM PDT

I can see how people would overlook that aspect but i'm using a gigabit network to rule that out, however it has brought into my mind the transfer rate of the RAID controller as i don't think it is anywhere near as fast as gigabit. Argghh fixing bottle necking is an endless job :/.

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A single SATA drive media speed is published.
Jun 1, 2011 4:08AM PDT

And it's all downhill from there. But back to the RAID on NAS. One of the problems you encounter is that folk will buy those 39 buck NAS things and wonder why it's no faster on 1000TP than it was on 100TP.

The price tag was a clue they seem to dismiss.
Bob