will this drive work with my other drive in raid 1?

[veryhumid]

I had this 160GB WD drive, which I bought about a year ago, and I just bought another drive thinking I could use them in RAID 1. However the models seem to be slightly different. I wouldn't have realized this but one is silver and one is black. the older one is model WD1600JD - 00GBB0, the newer one is model WD1600JD - 22HBB0. Both have LBA 312581818 as their LBA parameters. Basically one is a Caviar, one is a Caviar SE. Both are SATA. So I have two questions:

1. Will these work in RAID 1 at all?

2. If they do work, will some performance be compromised because they are not the exact same model number?

Thank you!!!

 

[Xaotic]

1) Absolutely, they are the same size. Even if they were different sizes, they would simply be limited to the size of the smaller drive and the performance of the slower drive.

2) There may be some drive geometry changes, like platter sizes, but they should still run well together. I would expect very little functional difference in the drives.

 

[veryhumid]

okay, cool. I'll pop them in, do the copy from one drive to the new one I am adding and post back to see how it goes.

what are the factors of compatibility? Size, spindle speed, buffer size? anything else?

edit: so I am using the onchip sata and I creat the raid 1 volume and windows detects it but it does not show up. It never even asked me to copy the data from one disk to the other. And I can't "un-raid" it without losing my 100GB of .mp3. if it just stole them all into some poorly designed interface I am going to hop into a warm bathtub with it.

 

[Xaotic]

First, don't panic. The data hasn't been overwritten, so it's still there.

Next, which controller and/or chipset are you using and in what system configuration? What steps did you take in configuring the array? Likely, it may just be a simple step to copy the data over to the new drive, but if necessary, do you have another drive to park data on?


As to factors in compatibility, firmware and drive geometry are among the largest. Manufacturer's often change platter capacity, number of platters, firmware and will even clip drives to lower sizes to eliminate additional production runs. Clipped drives are probably the hardest to project the operating specs for as the manufacturers are very careful to not release these proprietary disks. The clip changes the available capacity of the drive, by restricting access to sectors in firmware.

 

[veryhumid]

oh man last night was not fun. let's see if i can figure this out with you or anyone willing to help. Otherwise I am just going to call abit, see if they can walk me through something.

I am using the 2-port intel 82801ER SATA controller on my abit ic7-g. I was reading the motherboard manual for the installation. It says if you want to make create a raid 1 array you need to make sure you know what the source drive is and what the destination drive is. It asks for the Volume name, raid 1 or 0, and didn't even ask about source/destination in the raid bios. However I figured it would decide port 0 would be the source drive, and port 1 the destination by default, and that is how I connected them. So it created the array, and windows even detects it in the device manager, but it is not showing up in "my computer." It does show up in "disk management," but it says "unallocated" makes me think the data is gone.

I have some of it backed up, but surely not all. I really appreciate the help. I also noticed you can convert the RAID 1 array to "non-raid" disks in the menu, losing all the data. how much sense does that make?

 

[Xaotic]

I'll look around a bit today. I even have one at home, so I may be able to do some testing, but it's liable to be this weekend. It's my general use workstation.

 

[veryhumid]

no problem! thanks for responding so fast. I am going to have some time this afternoon to call abit. Hopefully I can get through and they can help. the word "unallocated" scares me. does that mean "totally empty"? or could there still be data on an "unallocated drive"? Thanks again

 

[Xaotic]

There should still be data on the drive. The IDE(PATA and SATA) controllers do not synch the drives like SCSI controllers do. On older U160 RAID controllers, you'd normally have to backup the drives first as the synch process can be destructive. It may be late tonight before I get a chance to do some digging.

 

[veryhumid]

haha, darn unallocated means unformatted. I know one of them is unformatted, but the other one is formatted with ntfs with lots of data on it!

 

[theELVISCERATOR]

um normally you format drives you are going to raid at time of setup. are you trying to raid a disk with data on it?

I wouldnt do that.

 

[Xaotic]

RAID-1 can normally be built live with data on a single disk. It's still better to backup first.

R-tools has found his files and he will be recovering them.

 

[veryhumid]

Just finishing up, now . I hate learning things the hard way. For the silicon image raid on my board it was as simple as telling the raid bios what was the source and what was the destination. The intel raid bios didn't even ask. After it finishes up I am going to format both, and see if things go smoother, but that was a terrible experience.

big thank you to Xaotic. There are lots of utilities out there, and he gave me the perfect one on the second try.