Building A NAS? Skip The Performance Drives
A while ago I was considering putting low-powered 5400rpm drives into a NAS. I was worried about performance, but Tom’s Hardware shows us that drive speed isn’t the bottleneck, and how slower drives can even beat faster ones.
The main bottleneck in any NAS is the RAID engine. Since many NAS units don’t include a dedicated controller, oftentimes the speed of the drive just doesn’t matter. If you’re using a blazing-fast hardware RAID card in your own custom-built setup, then drive speed might make a difference. But for most consumer units, the controller is the bottleneck.
With that in mind, you can go with slower 5400rpm drives that reduce power consumption, generate less heat, and will likely cost less up front too. Even if you have a dedicated RAID card that could let a 7200rpm drive do its thing at full speed, I’d consider the benefits of low-power drives to outweigh the marginal speed increase you might see.
This chart shows the difference between Samsung 7200pm and 5400rpm drives in various RAID configurations:
Not much, right? So think twice before you drop more than necessary on 7200rpm drives for your backup unit. Check out the link for the full test rundown. [Tom's Hardware]
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this is a poor test, the performance drive is only 320gb where as the green one is 1TB, bigger drives are always faster than a smaller counterpart because the data is more condensed on the platter, so the head reads more data with the same amount of distance traveled.
all you have to do is go to toms hdd charts and compare the 2TB green power vs the 2TB black, the black blows it out of the water, and is even faster than the WD 10,000rpm 300gb velociraptor.
however it is interesting to see how the the controllers are the bottle necks. I’d only use Green ones anyway, once raided together, they would be fast enough for the simple sequential server work these things do. only need a performance drive for your system drive, with lots of random access.
just remember, if buying a new computer, don’t get a 160gb drive just because “thats all you’ll ever use” get the biggest drive you can, if only for the performance boost (the extra capacity is just a bonus)