RAID 0 with not quite identical drives?

Roll · 11 Nov 2006 at 00:50

As title, I've got two SATA drives one is a Samsung SpinPoint and the other is a Maxtor. Although they are both the same size (160GB) and both have 8MB cache they will obviously not be 100% identical in performance etc.

I just wanted to check what will happen if I set them up together in RAID 0. Am I likely to be OK, or could I run into problems?

Thanks for replies

rpstewart · 11 Nov 2006 at 08:03

Chances are that it'll work fine. The fact that the drives are different might mean that one drive could be quicker than the other and hence the controller might have to wait a bit longer for data from the other drive. Performance might therefore not be as good as with 2 identical drives but I doubt it'll be that much of a difference.

Roll · 11 Nov 2006 at 08:52

Cheers I'll give it a go then

snowdog · 11 Nov 2006 at 22:41

No probs whatsoever unelss theyre faulty, you can even do 2 hdd's of diff sizes (although itll limit to 2x the smaller hdd then for raid 0) but if same interface (sata/pata) you can do any 2 hdd's in raid 0 .

smids · 12 Nov 2006 at 00:20

No recommended, but certainly possible.

As rpstewart seems to beat me on everything, he was yet again correct and quicker than me. Wait times between disks is the only real problem.

Roll · 12 Nov 2006 at 00:44

Thanks for the replies.

I set up the array earlier today and it seems to be working fine.

I might run some benchmarks on it later, but so long as it works without issues which it so far seems to then I'm happy