[Dylan16807]

> due to uneven load balancing, the parity drive is going to fail more often than in a configuration with distributed parity

Good, it can be the canary.

> thus you are going to need to recalculate parity for the array more often, which is a risky and taxing operation for all drives in the array

This is not worth worrying about.

First off, if the risk is linear then your increased parity failure is offset by decreased other-drive failure and I don't think you'll have more rebuilds.

And even if you do get more rebuilds, it's significantly less than one per year, and one extra full-drive read per year is a negligible amount of load. If you're worried about it all hitting at once then A) you should be scrubbing more often and B) throttle the rebuild.