having different HD for Raid-0 still ok?

WhiteFireDragon

WhiteFireDragon

New Member
i have a WD 160gig and hitachi 80gig. it's still possible to set them up in raid-0, but the only bad thing is that the system will only see 80gig total right? would there be any other negative impacts for having different brand and capacity HDs?
 
Forget it! would be the immediate advice by anyone who has worked with arrays. Both drives have to be identical in order to see working results. Plus arrays are far more fragile for the average user then simply seeing an extra logical drive with a second hard drive installed. You would need two WD 160s or two Jitahci 80gb drives to set that up correctly.
 
I would first dump the Hitachi believe it or not. I just resued one friend's system when the 80gb drive in that system was an ide model not that old. XP being the OS suddenly started seeing all kinds of freeze ups and froze when selecting anything in the F8 boot menu.

Even a repair install failed when that also froze. Fortunately the WD 250gb ide drive used for storage was onhand to be the new primary! You get away with a different brand seeing the same capacity but remember that arrays spread file fragments across two drives as one logical drive and are quite fragile where you could lose everything if something goes bad on you.

With two identical WD 500gb sata drives here with plans of a second pair of 500 or 750gb capacity I pondered on a sata array and refrained fast. XP is now on the first while the files stored from the last build are still availble along with more added since that time.

Once one of the new larger capacity drives comes down in price a little the smaller ide model currently seeing Vista could easily see Solaris or Linux or be removed. If the idea of an array there is to see an increase in storage capacity having a storage drive separate from the OS host can get you out of any tight spots data wise.
 
hmm ok i guess i'll just save up a little more money for another WD 160. i was just trying to make the best use of the old HDs that i have and wanted an array without spending more money.

in the future, i was planning to transfer the OS and programs on a WD raptor (when i get it) and having a RAID-0 to store data with once a month back up on the arrays. would this be better than having OS run off the arrays and data stored on the raptor with less frequent backups?
 
Arrays are fragile to begin with unless you have had quite of experience with them they wouldn't server the average home user too well. A Raptor on the other hand is a preferred by many as the OS not storage drive.

The one thing to know about arrays is they don't do much to increase capacity but simply extend a single partition across two drives while taking a look at a larger 320, 500, 750, and now 1tb sized drive would offer far more storage space on a single drive. Working with large video files or volumes of files here of different types including all kinds of freewares while storing some and looking others over you would be surpised how fast drive space can get used up even on a larger model.

One little glitch in Windows could easily bring any array down as well as seeing any other problems with one of the drives. The Raptors come in 160gb as well as 74gb at this point. Using the 80gb there for a temp OS drive with the 160gb WD model for storage would work well since you can replace the Hitachi and not anything on the WD drive sice that would be used separately as a storage device.
 
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