My 10 year old smaller 4tb drives are starting to fail. I was looking at the 10-14 tb WD red 7200 rpm with 128mb cache. My question is how will a larger single drive handle 2-3 plex streams then my 3 smaller ones. I am not even sure if it would matter. Looking for suggestion and input! Can I save money with 5400rpm?
I read the 128 vs 256mb cache articles and they state is a slight increase for multi stream use, is it worth the extra money? TIA
With 3 streams you should be below the load where this will matter much. The NAS drives should have a max. read/transfer speed of ~250 MBps (that’s 2,000 Mbps); while even a high quality / bitrate 4K stream will usually not go beyond 100 Mbps.
The common NAS drives will usually come as 7200 RPM models (Seagate seem to still offer some 5400 RPM models for drives up to 6 TB). It doesn’t seem to be the new driver for the drive prices.
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Thank you!
If we are still talking about hard drives and not SSDs: you cannot simply add up the bitrate of 3 files and see if you come out below 250 mbps.
There is significant time required to position the read heads, when reading 3 files at once. As a result, the total read speed can significantly decrease.
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Thank you for the reply, It is a bit over my head , I am reading up on bitrates. What would be a suggestion then?
