Raid5 setup with drives of different RPM

vishnumrao · 4. Februar 2020

I recently set up OMV 5 on an AMD system (A75m-itx motherboard). it has 4x SATA ports. OMV 5.x is installed on USB connected SSD. After playing a bit with this system, I am now ready to add HDDs to it.

I have 3x HGST 2TB (HDS5C3020ALA632) hard drives. I believe these are 5940 RPM.
I also have 1x 2TB HGST drive (HDS722020ALA330). This is a 7200 RPM drive.

My intention is to create a RAID5. So 4x TB drives resulting in a 6TB data volume. All my data will be backed up to a 6 TB USB connected external hard drive.

Question: Is it OK to create a RAID with drives that have different RPM speeds?

cabrio_leo · 12. Februar 2020

Zitat von vishnumrao

Question: Is it OK to create a RAID with drives that have different RPM speeds

I heard that in general it is not recommended to use disks of different speed because the slowest disk limits the performance of the array. But in principle it is possible.
Please look at this thread to make the right decision: RAID 5 with different sizes and different speeds?

dwainehead · 13. Februar 2020

The RPM relates only to the speed the disk turns, what to check is the read/write/seek speed of the drive and cache to determine is you will have a data bottle neck, drives will larger cache will have less of a performance hit then using drives with larger and smaller cache, drives with a slow read/write/seek time will also create a bottle neck, this will show up when your transferring large files or streaming.

magarity · 14. Februar 2020

It will function just fine to mix drives.

vishnumrao · 17. Februar 2020

Thanks all for the informative replies. I haven't tried it yet. I plan to try it after being able to free up a sata port on my system to add the new HDD.

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