Dell Perc5i Fast Hard Drives with Slow Ones

beastuser1

Honorable
Oct 7, 2013
2
0
10,510
I have 8 x1TB SLOW Hard Drives, because they are WD GreenPower Drives, and I want to upgrade them. All 8 of them have the same exact model numbers. They are currently in a RAID 10 Array which means I am only using half the space, which is okay with me because I need redundancy. Therefore I have 4 TB of Redundant storage, but they are slow.

It's not that its fast or slow, the speed is dynamic, ranging from super slow to mediocre speeds, sometimes even better than normal. My WD Black Drives never used to do this, they were running in single though and not RAID.

Now.... this is what I want to do. I currently have 4x WD Black 1 TB Hard Drives, and want to use it on my server instead of the crummy WD GreenPower drives.

The model number of the Black is WD1002FBYS and the Green Power is WD1000FYPS.

Based on what I know, this is how its set up:

FIRST RAID 0 GROUP:
1. WD Green Power 1 TB
2. WD Green Power 1 TB
3. WD Green Power 1 TB
4. WD Green Power 1 TB

SECOND RAID 0 GROUP:
1. WD Green Power 1 TB
2. WD Green Power 1 TB
3. WD Green Power 1 TB
4. WD Green Power 1 TB

Both Groups are in RAID 1 resulting in RAID 10

I want to replace the first group one by one with my black hard drives by removing one, then install it, let it rebuild and then vice versa for the rest of the 4 drives.

This is the end result until I have enough money to afford 4 more drives:

FIRST RAID 0 GROUP:
1. WD Black 1 TB
2. WD Black 1 TB
3. WD Black 1 TB
4. WD Black 1 TB

SECOND RAID 0 GROUP:
1. WD Green Power 1 TB
2. WD Green Power 1 TB
3. WD Green Power 1 TB
4. WD Green Power 1 TB

Both Groups are in RAID 1 resulting in RAID 10


Now, here is the question I have. First question is, can I mix drives like this or will the Perc 5i FORCE me to use identical drives? Second question, will the storage array BOTTLENECK to the GreenPower dives and I will only be able to see a significant speed difference when I upgrade them to all black?