Cross-edition raid with seagate drives?

[boulton]

I have a 7200.9 edition 160gb seagate drive, and if I was buying a new computer if I wanted to run 2 160gb drives in raid 0, will the new 7200.10 drives work with the 7200.9? Might be a silly question, but the newer ones have a lower seek time and I was wondering if that would interfere somehow.

Also, is it possible to create a sort of raid 0+1 if I bought 2 of the newer 80gb drives and had them in raid 0, then had that raid in raid 1 with a single drive (the 160gb one) or do you always need 4 drives to make that work? I don't even use all the 160gb drive so it would be enough space.

 

[semi-pro waster]

In theory at least you could use the 7200.10s with the 7200.9s, it isn't ideal because as you say it has different seek times etc but there is no reason on a hardware or software level that it won't work. It could potentially be more likely to fail as an array since you are running drives of different specifications but if your data isn't hugely important I doubt it will matter hugely.

I've never heard of Raid0+1 across 3 drives as I'm pretty sure you need 4 drives to do so but I could be wrong on that.

 

[Snapshot]

You need four (almost) identical drives for RAID10 as most mobos stripe the mirrored pairs rather than mirroring the striped pairs. I hope that makes sense....