Hey there,
anyone know if there's any advantage to 'balancing' the amount of data on the drives before creating the parity file?
for example, if I have 700GB(1.5TB drive) and 1.5TB(2TB drive) used, would it be better to spread the data evenly, or will the smaller drive get removed from parity generation once it's 'done', and the parity file will generate quicker for the remaining data on the 2TB?
For the initial parity creation if your drives are balanced it will be faster as all the data from all the drives is read at the same time for parity creation. So if your largest drive (data stored) has 1.5TB it will initially take as long as it takes to read all of the 1.5TB of information. But if you were to balance the drive where you have 700GB + 1500GB across the two drives, you will only have 1.1TB of data as the largest amount to be read.
After you have the initial parity created it should not make any difference whether the drives are balanced or not, disparity need to process the data on each drive individually for any updates.
thanks for the info!
I'm honestly not sure if it would make any noticeable difference. The same amount of data has to be read from all drives no matter how it's distributed. The only difference that good balancing could make is that the overall size of the parity data will be smaller, so that would be less parity written to disk during the create.
But the difference would be so small, I wouldn't design your disk usage around that concern. I sure don't! :)
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