Mixing drive formats in a Raid?

R

rive22

Supreme [H]ardness
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Mar 10, 2004
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I've got 4 WD10EALS 1TB Blue in Raid 0 as my Audio/Video editing drive. I could get a couple more for a good deal and would like to toss them on but they are the WD10EALX Advanced Format drives.

Would it be a bad idea to mix and match? My thoughts tell me yes, but hey ya never know.
 
always a bad idea to mix different drive type, rotational speeds, and manufacturers in any kind of RAID set. One set of drives may support features that the others do not.
 
It will work though. I have had to do this many times at work because the new drive was not the same model as the old but that is with linux software raid which tends to be more forgiving than fakeraid or hardware raid.
 
using LVM in Linux to create a volume is software RAID and you're right, it WILL work. However, it's certainly not recommended.
 
As long as your partitions are properly aligned, it would be fine in theory. I read on a WD support forum that advanced format drives are slightly slower than their 512b sector siblings (currently).

I wouldn't do it simple for the reason of having 6 drives in raid 0 is way too high a risk of losing everything if a single drive fails or gets corrupted.
 
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