Do the hard drives have to be IDENTICAL?

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I'm planning on raiding a pair 30.x GB Maxtor 5400 RPM drive I only have one drive right now (purchased it a while ago). How do I know if I have the same EXACT drive? Will it work if it is just close enough? What will the performance be like in a RAID-0 array using a 5400 rpm drive?

Thanks..


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I have a maxtor 20.4 gig 7200 rpm ada66 drive. I ordered another 20.4 gig 7200 drive, but they shipped a 5400 rpm ata-100 instead. Before I returned it, I tried striping them in a raid array, and to my surprise it worked just fine. I was getting 29000 marks on the sandra drive benchmark (normal ata66 disks are 13000). It seemed to be stable, too. So, if you'll be using two 5400 rpm drives, it should not be a problem. It's good if spindle speeds, buffers, and possibly DMA modes are the same. If not, oh well, it'll probably still work.

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The size of the drive is what you should be concerned with. If you get a smaller drive than a 30Gb, then the RAID 0 setup will be limited to the size of the smaller drive. I.E., if you got a 20Gb disk and used your 30Gb, then your RAID 0 size would be 40Gb, instead of 60Gb if you used an identically sized 30Gb hard drive.


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