After reading the forum for over a year, I finally decided to join in on the fun. Now that I'm here, the obligatory first question for the experts...

I will be upgrading from my current EX470 to EX495 in the next few weeks, and I'll be migrating all of my data to the new hard drives. I'm currently running Samsung EcoGreen F1s in my EX470, and will be getting all new EcoGreen F2s (or WD Green drives) for the EX495. I've been happy with the green drives for MSS, but since the new EX495 comes with hardware capable of much more than EX470, I started thinking that it may make more sense to run a faster drive as the first (system) drive (the new Samsung F3 or WD Black), and then use green drives for the rest of the array. Would it make a noticeable difference in performance, or simply make the MSS more power-hungry and loud(er)? Is it not a good idea to mix the different speed drives in the array?

BTW, if I had to prioritize my goals when it comes to the new server, it would be: 1) noise level, 2) performance and 3) power consumption.

Thanks.

Congrats on the purchase and welcome to the forum


With regard to the system drive speed, the consensus seems to that the WHS OS does fine on either a 5800 RPM drive or 7200 drive. It's really a preference issue. The EX495 comes with a 7200 rpm drive. I'd leave it in there as no reason to remove it. Can't go wrong with that really. As Alex noted in his review, it sounds like even with the 7200 rpm drive in as the primary drive, it's very quiet already.

You can mix drives. I have 7200 rpm and 5800 rpm drives in my MSS with no issues.

On the other drives, if you want to go to new drives in order to get larger drives for more storage, then by all means go for it. If you're going to get the same size drives just newer, then I suspect you'll not gain anything. Plus, you'll find it much easier to bring those existing data drives into the MSS (via server recovery --- see Alex's blog article about a month ago on doing this) than transferring all the data manually over to new drives.

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HP MSS EX490 with Intel E6300
4 GB RAM
7 TB Drive Storage

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