Okay to use different hard drive brands in same RAID?

[CountryBumkin]

I am building a hardware RAID using eight 3TB drives - but four of the drives are WD Red and the other four are HGST 7K3000 models. All are the same size (3TB).

Should I be concerned that the drives are not the same brand/manufacturer?

Also this going to be a RAID6 or a RAID10 array if that enters into the decision process (I'm still trying to decide which is right for me).

 

[jimpz]

Odds are they will work, but you best reliability comes from identical drives, occasionally, even an 'identical' drive, with later firmware can cause issues.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Yes, in fact there are some who recommend it because it reduces the likelyhood of a bad batch of drives failing simultaneously.

 

[CountryBumkin]

Does it matter that the WD drives are 5400rpm and the HGST drives are 7200rpm? Will it just perform at the speed of the slowest drive?

 

[jimpz]

Speed differences may cause more issues, I know what 'Someone Somewhere' is saying, but I worked in one of the larger raid companies (and we actually did remote support for several of them) more raid failures were due to mismatched drives than bad batches (which never failed all at once)

 

[CountryBumkin]

Thanks for all the replies.
I think the smart thing t do would be to create two different arrays with the same drive models in each array. I have two controllers so I can go this route. So I'll do two RAID6 arrays with four drives of the same make in each (later expanding with more of the same model drives).

 

[reoost]

It will probably work as long as you don't switch between HDD and SSD because it can be glitchy