RAID Drives need to be identical?

Ben Cole

Ben Cole

Ben Cole

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I've never used RAID before but might have a play now because I found that a 250Gb drive I had lying round was SATA not IDE as I thought.

I realise that the drives need to be the same capacity for striping so can anybody tell me what I can do with theses two?

Maxtor Diamond Max 10 Model:6V250F0 250Gb

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 Model:ST3250620AS 250GB

Thanks,

Ben.
 
Ideally drives put into a striped or mirrored array should be identical model/make, as otherwise the 2 will be pulling "unequally." This just means that the faster drive will have to wait for the slow to catch up with its part of the data all the time, essentially reducing the performance slightly. Similarly, there might be minor differences between drive sizes even if they're both the same rated size.

Of your 2 drives, the 7200.10 is somewhat substantially faster than the Maxtor, so pairing it with the Maxtor will arguably be doing it a disservice. But, it's probably not the worst... suck it and see is probably best idea here. You can do either RAID0 (striped for speed) or RAID1 (mirrored for redundancy). Note that RAID0 obviously doubles the statistical likelihood of the set failing (which means it's still fairly unlikely to happen, just doubly moreso than with a single drive. Doubling a very small likelihood is still small.) As always however, *always* make sure you have good backup regime in place, or expect to lose your data sometime in the future. This is obviously more important in the case of RAID0 and and also when using Maxtor drives as they currently have a bad reputation with respect to failure rate.
 
It helps if the drives are identical, but no harm comes of them not.

The slowest drive of the two will limit the faster one from moving data any faster than the slowest drive.
 
Been sucking it for a month or so.

Seems to work nicely. :)

Windows Vista gave a performance increase of 0.7 over the Barracuda on it's own.
 
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