some drives built for raid?

[zaiLex]

Are some drives better suited for RAIDing than others? For example would putting 2x 250gb Seagate 7200.7 drives in Raid0 be troublesome? And lastly, is it possible to have IDE & SATA drives in a computer at the same time?

[unhappy_mage]

Yes and yes. The WD JB series, if I recall, is their raid edition. The Maxline 3's from Maxtor are enterprise-type drives as well, and I think the Seagate equivalent is the NL35 or something.

http://www.hardfolding.com/ftag1.php/mem/150072 (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=38&id=150072&tm=33)

[zaiLex]

enterprise = raid edition?

[jpmkm]

I thought one of the main benefits of raid is that it could be used with any old drive. What exactly makes one drive better suited for raid than another?

[unhappy_mage]

For raid 5, it's not as important to have error recovery on the drive itself, it's more important to get the data off the drive fast. So the WD drives give up faster at trying to recover slightly bad blocks. That's good for speed in an environment where errors are already corrected, but it'd be bad in a single drive configuration aka desktop.

All drives can be raided, but some are designed with that in mind.

http://www.hardfolding.com/ftag1.php/mem/150072 (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=38&id=150072&tm=33)

[cyberjt]

Whilst I can not remember exactly where I read it, I think the RAID editions of the drives have a slightly different warranty, i.e a higher MTF, the benches I have seen for the RAID editions were actually slighty lower than their non-raid edition counterparts, in single drive mode, obviously once in RAID on a decent controller this slight performance issue decreases due to the cache on the controller.

[zaiLex]

"250GB Western Digital SE16 - SATA II"
is this an enterprise (raidable) drive?

[DougLite]

^ Negative, that's a desktop unit (WD2500KS). You can still hook it up to a RAID controller if you like, but you may experience issues related to the error recovery procedures discussed earlier.