Drive sizes between manufacturers

NathanE · 21 Apr 2009 at 15:04

I am thinking of getting a couple new WD 500GB AALS drives to replace my aging Seagate 500GBs which are pretty slow by todays standards (50MB/sec...)

I can't remember if drive sizes are the same between manufacturers?

I would want to simply port my RAID 1 array over to the new WD drives but obviously I can only do this if the WD drives have >= the exact amount of bytes that the Seagates had.

Anyone know?

rpstewart · 21 Apr 2009 at 15:23

Interesting... Don't have an answer but there is an alternative.

Do you have a couple of spare (even temporarily) SATA ports? You could create a second RAID1 array with the new drives and image the contents of the existing array across. Then simply remove the Seagate array and reconnect any temporarily removed disks in its place.

Nick1881 · 21 Apr 2009 at 16:01

They don't have to be the same size. I used Acronis true image to ghost my OS over from 2 x 250Gb Raid0 to 2 x 64Gb Raid0 and it worked fine.

NathanE · 21 Apr 2009 at 20:13

I wasn't planning on ghosting though. Was just going to use the RAID 1 array to get it to rebuild the array, one drive at a time.