RAID5 - Can you use different drives?

[Kona*]

Tomorrow I have to go and fix a RAID5 array which currently consists of three Maxtor (I think) 500GB drives. A guy at work reckons I can just bang in a Seagate 500GB drive and rebuild the array, I was under the impression all drives had to be identical? So what will it be... will I have to order in some more Maxtor drives or can I use a Seagate drive on a Maxtor array? If it matters the array controller is a Adaptec 2420SA.

Cheers,

Craig

 

[rpstewart]

It'll work fine with mismatched drives.

 

[Rroff]

afaik all that matters is all the discs have enough space for the partition size... if you created an array with 4 mismatched discs then the partition on all discs would normally be scaled to match the smallest drive, with an already built array you will need to make sure the replacement HDD has enough free space (and 2 different 500gig drives can have varying sizes for the largest available partition even if its only a few bytes)

 

[m3lv1n]

They work best with matched drives but its not necessary. The gotcha is if the seagate is a few bytes smaller than the maxtor's if it is you will not be able to rebuild the array.

 

[jimblowscash]

theoreticaly it shouldnt matter so long as there matched in capacity however they do vary between brands and can sometimes go screwey for no logical reason. id swap them all out and ditch the maxtor im affraid, as they are rapidly gaining a reputation as a budget drive and have performance to match, seagate seem to be flavor of the month at the mo