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I have 2 SATA hard disks They are 2 TB each. Both are WDC Greens Respective models of *EARS *EARX

EARX is SATA-III While the other is not. While the raid does function as is, would there be any - Improvement or stability bonus to set the jumper to 3Gb/s mode on the SATA-III drive?

I wonder [if] "something" might get confused because of the physical disk cache being faster on one than the other. But truly I don't know enough about data storage to answer that.

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  • Any performance increase you would likely even notice. You already are bottlenecked at 3Gb/sec so setting the jumper wouldn't make the RAID any faster.
    – Ramhound
    Commented May 17, 2013 at 12:40
  • On a HDD@5400RPM; Im already capped in transfer to under 1Gb p/s each. But this is a question that more has to do with the disk cache, which as I understand moves quite a bit quicker for purposes im not completely sure of. (as in, I would be guessing) -
    – TardisGuy
    Commented May 17, 2013 at 12:43
  • You don't indicate how large the disk's cache is. Any performance gain likely couldn't even be measured or would be insignficant because of the other bottleknecks.
    – Ramhound
    Commented May 17, 2013 at 12:49

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While the RAID does function as is, would there be any - improvement or stability bonus to set the jumper to 3Gb/s mode on the SATA-III drive?

Theoretically you gain some performance when the array only has to read data from the fastest drives cache.

However I expect this gain to be minimal, possible not even showing up on benchmarks. Certainly much less then you will notice.

Having said that:

  1. There is not reason not to jumper for the faster speed. It will not help but it should not hurt either. The only reason to use the slow setting is for backwards compatibility with broken controllers.
  2. How is your RAID set up? With most RAID configuration you have to wait for multiple drive to read part of the data. If one drive is faster then the other is slower. And you will end waiting on the slower one. (Exception: RAID 1 ).

I wonder [if] "something" might get confused because of the physical disk cache being faster on one than the other. But truly I don't know enough about data storage to answer that.

Nothing should get confused.

Which RAID card are you using? Hardware RAID? Software RAID? How does it handle TLER.

There is a reason why green drives are often a bad choice for RAID, but I heard people successfully used them after applying WDIDLE.

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  • Excellent composition, TY. Your answer on cache helps me to visualize it. [My raid Setup]- the two drives are GPT format & split partitions: Half mirror(1tb), Half Stripe(2tb) set in AMD chilpset raid mode on sata channel. "Fakeraid" I guess they call it. (This being my solution to wanting some speed for virtualization and experimentation) but also redundancy for really important backups. But main boot is set on on OCZ VTX4 SSD 128.
    – TardisGuy
    Commented May 17, 2013 at 14:34
  • As for issues with the greens - I have really had no issues aside from my own errors in experimenting and learning raid, such as how to boot UEFI, what GPT was, etc... I chose the drives because they were low power, low heat, low spin, because this computer is on all the time, and i wanted something that "might" last. All just in case you wanted to know.
    – TardisGuy
    Commented May 17, 2013 at 14:38

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