Raid 5/6 question

I know you have to have all the hard drives the same size in an array...but what if they're not all the same company? Like WD and Seagate 400Gb satas?

Most adapters nowadays will accept it, but I wouldn't do it if I could help it.

wait...wait... the other one is not seagate... it's another WD but the Raid edition... still same thing as before?

Mixing brands isn't a big deal between comparable drives.

As long as you are not mixing different speed drives (ie: 7200rpm with 10krpm), the drives are the same size (they will likely vary by a few bytes), and you are creating the array with the mixed disks (not extending it), then it should be OK. It will be a lot more stable with all the same drives.

really the restriction only applies to raid 0/1 if your doing a raid 5 or 6 you can mix and match brands, speeds, and sizes.

....SO which is it?... It's ok...not ok... not ok but won't actually kill anything....

Both are 16mb cache, 7200 rpm, 400gb, Sata 150... But the raid edition is the 5 yr warranty WD4000YR, and the other is 3 yr warranty WD4000KD.

They're the same drive right - or very close...i'm thinking no future problems...?

infinitevalence said:

really the restriction only applies to raid 0/1 if your doing a raid 5 or 6 you can mix and match brands, speeds, and sizes.

Click to expand...

If you mix speeds, then all of your reads & writes will slow to the slowest disk. The faster disks will complete the operations, but will sit idle waiting for the slower disks. It'll work, but you lose some of the speed advantage. In the case of mixed speeds, I would create two arrays instead.

It should be OK to mix & match, but it would be much safer with all of the same drive. In your case, it's more likely that the 3-year warranty drives will fail sooner than if you bought all 5-year warranty drives, which are likely a higher-quality drive.