Can i use 7200 rpm drive WITH a 5400 rpm drive in MyCloud EX2? Both are 4tb

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX2
#1

After 5 years, I had an original WD RED 4tb 5400rpm drive in Bay 2 go bad. I want to replace it with a 4tb 7200rpm drive. Will this cause me a problem having DIFFERENT RPM speeds?

My reasoning is that when the second original drive goes bad, I want to upgrade it to a 4tb 7200 rpm drive, but I don’t won’t a compatibility problem between the two drives.

Additionally, is there an advantage to having the new drive in the Bay 1 position?

#2

I threw together an EX2 Ultra I got off Ebay (which was wrongly listed as “broken”-- Heh.) with some junk mismatched drives for a co-worker, specifically to set it up as a PLEX server.

Different capacities, and types.

Worked just fine.

The firmware does not care too much about the reported things from SMART other than drive health. Not that I would suggest throwing something like an SMR drive in or some other madness, but identical sizes with mismatched speed? Not a big deal. The linux raid driver will just slow the array to the speed of the slowest member, so the 7200 RPM drive will just read a little faster, and then wait around while the 5200 RPM drive klunks along during writes.

#3

Thanks for the feedback.

In regards to using the EX2 Ultra as a Plex Server, do you have the issues of Plex not being able to convert .avi or .mkv files on the fly?

thanks.
GDavid

#4

depends on the codec inside them. both are container formats.

#5

I run a Plex server on my EX2 ultra, however I wouldnt have it doing any conversion or transcoding as it doesnt really have that higher specced hardware. You might be OK if you are only going to have 1 stream active, otherwise it might be a better option to manually convert the files to be to a better file format before making them available for streaming.

The processing power needed will also be determined, as Wierd_w says, by the codecs being used.

I can happily run multiple streams simultaneously using LAN and WAN connectivity, I doubt I would be able to achieve that smoothly if the NAS was having to convert the files on the fly.