Raiding not quite identical drives?

[mac124]

Basically i am thinking of adding a second drive in raid to one of my pcs but there is a slightly newer out could it still work?

The "old" drive is a Seagate barracuda 7200.9 and the new one is a 7200.10, both are 8mb cache and sata 2?

It should work shouldn't it?

[alexnifty]

Far as I know it should work.

You can use drives of different capacities for raid-0 you will have the capacity of the smaller drive, so using dissimilar drives seems plausable.

[marsey99]

best way to find out is try it :) just make sure you have a backup first.

tbh i think it should work as long as the mobo can read the drive i cant see the speed affecting it.

[k.jacko]

I think as alexnifty has said, it uses the lowest common denominator, meaning the smaller/slower of the combination of drives.

[coiler]

I tried raid-0 and after losing some data (i didn't back up - a little too much faith in raid) and constant problems I decided the little speed increase really wasn't worth it.

[mac124]

All my important stuff will be on another drive, this will just be a small boot drive, 2x 80gb. I have raided a couple of 250GB drives in my gaming pc and found the boot / load times seem quite a bit better, not twice the speed but the data rate (according to a little benchy prog) is 50% faster then the old single drive setup. So as i will be redoing my normal every day pc i thought i might raid the boot drive on that too, would only cost £25 or so for the drive.

[marsey99]

i did the same on my setup but lost some data i wish i hadnt so i didnt setup my array the last few times i installed.

some of my bench scores was nearly 80% faster and it would bootup and load in seconds which was nice.

this is 1 of the things i regret about overclocking as it was that (well me messing about with it) that killed (not really the best word, corrupted) the array.

[brendy]

Having been playing and testing 80gb160, 250 and 74gb (raptor) sata drives in raid and singles, the striped raptors were the best when running together (no surprise there) however, I ended up using one raptor for boot and the second drive as a seperate spindle for databases, this should hold true for games also. Keep your OS seperate from your most used apps and games and you will notice a better more responsive machine for windows and gaming. If you wanted to push the boat out, get a third smallish drive and whack the pagefile onto it away from the windows spindle.

[mac124]

Again my gaming machine has a couple of 250gb drives in raid0 again seems to boot/ run things faster, i disagree about the seperate drive for games (i don't doubt it wont be faster but no necessarily better) as a few games i have had refuse to run properly when installed in non default locations, i tried a while back and eneded up with games scattered across 2 drives which wasn't pleasant. Now as long as i can remember to backup my valve folder and saved games folders (again scattered across several files :| ) reinstalling should the worst happen shouldn't be too much of a drag.