MP 1,1-5,1 Hard Drives

[cosmichobo]

G'day,

One of my Mac Pro 5,1's functions is operating as a Plex server. Is there any benefit to having a 7200rpm drive over a 5400rpm drive, when the media being read will be transmitted by Wifi and/or Ethernet (over power point)?

I'm currently using 2 x 4TB WD WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 5400rpm drives for media, but am looking at buying another 2 x 4TB.

(Have a Samsung EVO SSD as start up drive, connected in 2nd optical bay, til I can afford a PCIE card...)

Cheers

cosmic

 

[zedex]

I like using WD Gold 7200RPM because they R/W consistently at 225MB/s. This data transfer rate approaches the SATA II ceiling (circa 275MB/s). IMO - if you can saturate the SATA II interface with faster and cheaper modern HDDs - why wouldn't you..?

 

[cosmichobo]

Certainly agree with your ideology...!

Long term, ie the next 12-18 months, I'm hoping to "upgrade" from my base model 5,1, to a 12-core top end 5,1, so stocking up on goodies that can just transfer over - makes perfect sense.

Cost wise - the Gold looks to sell for about $250... which is more than I was looking at.

On a side note... my first car had license plates that read "ZEDEX"... Nissan fan?

 

[zedex]

AWESOME - I'm sure I used to see those plates around the Perth suburbs from time to time (and yes I was a big fan of the old 300ZX). You don't need to pay $250 per drive - either get 'used' WD GOLD 4TB (x4) from a current eBay listing for $150 ea OR checkout local pricing on some Seagate HDDs and examine the drive specifications to confirm typical speeds. Price per drive will be closer to $110 per unit.

Fully transferrable hardware - good thinking

..and I'll be listing a 12-core on gumtree (northbridge) in the next few days

 

[Juicy Box]

One of my Mac Pro 5,1's functions is operating as a Plex server.

I have a Mac Pro 1,1 that is current being used as my Plex server.

I have upgraded my media server drive many times over the years, but I am currently using two 4TB WD Red drives in a SW RAID0 (8TB) for Plex. It is being backed up with a 14TB single drive, and I have a 250GB SSD for the boot drive.

Last year, I was using a RAID0 with two SSDs for the boot drive, and an external back up solution for the Plex server, but since I don't really use the Mac Pro anymore for anything but Plex, the extra performance from having a striping RAID for the boot drive just wasn't worth it taking up an extra drive bay.

So, I went to a single SSD for the boot drive and I partitioned the 14TB drive and use it as a daily back up for the Plex server, the boot drive, and I keep some bootable back ups of old MacOS versions when I need to use older software.

One of my Mac Pro 5,1's functions is operating as a Plex server. Is there any benefit to having a 7200rpm drive over a 5400rpm drive, when the media being read will be transmitted by Wifi and/or Ethernet (over power point)?

Are you currently having any issues with your setup? I wonder if you are having a similar problem that I had a few years ago.

I thought that my Plex server issues may have been HDD performance-related. So, I purchased better performing drives, but the problem persist and it ended up being mostly network related.

Is there any benefit to having a 7200rpm drive over a 5400rpm drive

Contrary to popular belief (at least on this forum), comparing just the RPM alone between two HDDs doesn't translate to faster or slower performance, unless the two HDDs otherwise have completely identical specs.

Basically, higher RPM doesn't necessarily translate to higher performance or write and read speeds. There are plenty of 5400 drives that out perform 7200 drives.

Another thing to consider is how long it takes the drives to spin up from sleep. All else being equal, the 7200 HDD would take longer to spin up from sleep than a 5400.

I had an issue in the past where the Plex app would basically stall sometimes when the attempting to play something when the Mac Pro's drives were sleeping. I would see the black screen with the spinning icon like something was loading, but it wouldn't ever play.

Going back a screen and starting the video over would usually fix the problem.

The above issue would almost guaranteed to happen back when I was using Wifi over a hardline Ethernet cable.

when the media being read will be transmitted by Wifi and/or Ethernet

I had a lot of issues with Plex over Wifi. New equipment helped, but the problems would still happen.

Due to the location of the Mac Pro, running Ethernet just wasn't realistic and power line ethernet adapters gave me worse performance than Wifi.

One day, I just ran a really long ethernet cable up a few flight of stairs and connected the Mac Pro directly to the router, and the problems went away.

I eventually moved the Mac Pro to a better place to run Ethernet directly, and the problems went away.

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

G'day,

One of my Mac Pro 5,1's functions is operating as a Plex server. Is there any benefit to having a 7200rpm drive over a 5400rpm drive, when the media being read will be transmitted by Wifi and/or Ethernet (over power point)?

I'm currently using 2 x 4TB WD WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 5400rpm drives for media, but am looking at buying another 2 x 4TB.

(Have a Samsung EVO SSD as start up drive, connected in 2nd optical bay, til I can afford a PCIE card...)

Cheers

cosmic

When it come to storage, I would calculate the per TB unit price, and often pick the second to highest capacity HDD available at the time because they have the best unit price.
Seems to me that HDDs with longer warranty period (5yrs) are all 7200rpm.
I bought a WD Gold 2 years ago, but that model is no longer exist. It's renamed to Ultrastar now.