Hard Drives in Raid question

[Biscuit]

Im planning on running a raid 1 setup when i do my next upgrade. I currently have a 250GB western digital drive (model number WD2500KS) would i be able to run it with a new WD250 drive or do they need to be completely identical?

Thanks

[tonpal]

You should be able to pair any 2 drives of the same size.

Remember that RAID 1 does protect you from a disk failure but not a data error of controller failure so use it as part of your back up strategy not as the whole back up strategy.

[Biscuit]

its more for increased read speeds than it is for backup as it will be an OS drive. Is that the best raid mode to use?

[Lee H]

Raid 1 (mirror) doesn't improve the speeds as all it is doing is cloning 1 disc to another in case 1 fails.

If you want increased speeds, then RAID 0 (stripe) is going to have to be the one you should be looking at

[tonpal]

As Lee said for increased performance you would be looking at RAID 0 (striping). This RAID configuration has no fault tolerance so you would need to back up.

Wikipedia has a good article on RAID:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redunda...ependent_disks

[!TIMMY!]

The bad thing about Raid 0 is if one of the HD's fails, the whole raid fails and you will lose all the data on both HD's. On the other size you get the speed increase. I have a 4 HD Raid 0 set up (which I backup every night) with 2 old 250GB western digital drive (WD2500KS) and 2 of the newer 250GB western digital drives and its working great

[badass]

Raid 1 (mirror) doesn't improve the speeds as all it is doing is cloning 1 disc to another in case 1 fails.

If you want increased speeds, then RAID 0 (stripe) is going to have to be the one you should be looking at

Correct for all home RAID setups. I think on some newer enterprise class controllers, they load balance between the 2 disks for reading now.
I've not looked into it, but on our HP servers, there is no RAID 1 available - only RAID 0+1 even for 2 disks. I suspect it divides the initial disk into stripes then mirrors it then it can read from alternate stripes simultaneously. I haven't tested that so can;t say for sure if it does do that though.