Cannot find replacement drive for RAID

fatherjack360 · 18 Sep 2012 at 14:21

Hi All
I've got an old server box here with an Areca 1220 RAID card and 6 WD Caviar RE
320GB hard drives in RAID5. Recently one of the disks died and so far I've not been able
to find a source that stocks them, not surprising they are 2006 era SATA 1.5 drives. Is it
possible for me to buy a new WD Caviar RE4 500GB drive and use that to rebuild the array
(using 320 of 500GB capacity of course)? Has anyone done this in the past and suffered any
negative problems?

Thanks

DiscoDave · 18 Sep 2012 at 14:26

Although not having specific experience with that hardware, providing your replacement drive is the same interface and RPM speed as the other disks in the array you should be fine. SATA drives are backwards compatible, and I think some have jumpers that explicitly force a connection speed.

fatherjack360 · 18 Sep 2012 at 15:31

The drives are both 7200RPM and there is a jumper on the RE4 to go into SATA 1.5 mode. Only other things on the RE4 is 64MB cache instead of 8MB.

DiscoDave · 18 Sep 2012 at 15:43

You can mix drives with different cache sizes in RAID5, but you may get a slight reduction in performance. Rule of thumb is the array will run as fast as the slowest drive.