Mixed WD10EADS & WD10EARS Raid?

[-Sn1PeR-]

I currently have 4x WD10EADS drives in a software raid 5 on my ubuntu server. Newegg is holding their sale today of WD10EARS drives -- will it work for me to add a few more and grow my array?

Also, will a WD10EADS and a WD10EARS drive work together for a Raid1 in Windows 7?

 

[sub.mesa]

Yea they are fully compatible.

Please check for alignment though; your partition on the RAID should start at sector 2048 not at 63. You can check this with GParted, right click your partition and click Information.

 

[-Sn1PeR-]

Can you link any good articles on Raid alignment? I'm still having trouble grasping the concept and idea behind alignment. When I boot up gparted it does not show my /dev/md0 partition, but it does show each drive individually. When I run 'sudo gparted /dev/md0' it shows /dev/md0p1 as an Unknown ext3 filesystem.

I'm seeing Sectors/Track: 63 in gparted, making me think I'm not doing it right. Any ideas?

 

[sub.mesa]

First sector: 0

So it's perfectly aligned.

Edit: oh i forgot, could you also show me the partition on the individual disks (/dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd) - each has a partition on it; you would need to look that the partition on the raw disks is aligned, too. It should not start at sector 63.

The Cylinders Head Sector (CHS) addressing is a very old way to communicate with drives. Though you still see it appearing now and then it has no real relevance anymore. Today we think in LBA addressing; as in the disk starts at LBA 0 (sector 0) and ends at LBA <high number> being the last sector on the drive (or partition).