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NCQ or 16MB Sata drives for Server's RAID array?

C

cfineman

Junior Member
Putting together a raid 5 array on a server that will serve up media to one or two tv's as well as hosting a SqueezeBox server. Probably do ripping on it as well. Probably will *not* do any PVR functionality on it.

I've got a SATA2 raid card that (by definition) supports NCQ. Sticking mainly with 250GB drives since that seems to be the sweet spot right now I found the following:

Samsung/NCQ/8MB @ $.28/GB - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16822152025
Maxstor/NCQ/8MB @ $.30/GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16822144088

WD/No NCQ/16MB @ $.30/GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16822144701
SG/No NCQ/16MB @ $.30/GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16822148144
 
IMO, just go for the cheapest\best warranty. For what you're doing you probably won't see much benefit from either NCQ or 16MB cache.
 
Originally posted by: cfineman
Putting together a raid 5 array on a server that will serve up media to one or two tv's as well as hosting a SqueezeBox server. Probably do ripping on it as well. Probably will *not* do any PVR functionality on it.

I've got a SATA2 raid card that (by definition) supports NCQ. Sticking mainly with 250GB drives since that seems to be the sweet spot right now I found the following:

Samsung/NCQ/8MB @ $.28/GB - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16822152025
Maxstor/NCQ/8MB @ $.30/GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16822144088

WD/No NCQ/16MB @ $.30/GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16822144701
SG/No NCQ/16MB @ $.30/GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16822148144
Click to expand...

in all honesty, you would be fine with any of the drives - i would probably go the cheapest since you will need the space over time
 
Given that you are serving up media primarily, and aren't doing a lot of random seeks, I'd spring for the 16mb cache, if anything. Especially since all of the drives are in the same price category as well. I've seen benchmarks where the extra cache *can* increase performance moreso than the NCQ, but I've never seen as to how that is implemented in RAID configurations...
 
I doubt NCQ will make much difference there, a little perhaps but not much. It really comes into it's own in really random access patterns, you won't have them on your machine. The cache would probably help more.
 
Originally posted by: Bobthelost
I doubt NCQ will make much difference there, a little perhaps but not much. It really comes into it's own in really random access patterns, you won't have them on your machine. The cache would probably help more.
Click to expand...

Agreed. Media servers are more about capacity, reliability, and STR. For serving up lots of different things at once, low seek times can help, but I doubt NCQ would do much. Command queueing helps mostly with doing tons and tons of tiny little random reads/writes (like a database or web server).

When you're dealing with multi-gigabyte video files, 8 versus 16 megs of cache isn't that relevant. 😛
 
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