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Mixing Hard Drive types in RAID?

L

llars

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 12, 2006
Messages
104
I am currently running 4x 300gb Seagate 7800.8 drives in JBOD (The onboard Raid-5 on the A8N-SLI sucks balls). I am planning on buying a Highpoint 2320 controller and two more Hard Drives to do 1.5TB in Raid-5 when I upgrade my motherboard, but the 7200.8 drives are getting hard to find because Seagate discontinued them. If I were to add two 7800.9 drives, would I run into problems, or would it be better for me to try and find two more 7800.8's?
 
It is not recommended, but may work fine. There are a lot of variables so giving a definite answer is hard. Chances are that the reliability of a mixed-HDD RAID is strictly less than the reliability of an array will all the same drives. However the magnitude of the difference is hard to estimate.
 
I'd suggest switching to 7200.10s not .9s. But buy three instead of two, and create a second array. Expand the array with OCE and you're set. The 7200.10s should be available a little longer than the underperforming .[89]s.

 
it won't hurt anything, you can run an array with any brand drive and any speed...the array will just be bottlnecked by the slower drives.

but yeah...sell your 300gb's and buy 5x7200.10's - and dont get the highpoint *shutter*
 
Mellman said:
and dont get the highpoint *shutter*
Click to expand...
Expand on this, please. Everything I've seen says the 2320s are pretty nice, especially at that price range. What alternatives would you suggest?

 
well in my sleeping state, i realized i spelled shudder wrong...

anyways,

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/highpoint-rocketraid-2320_16.html

Them, among many other sites have shown the highpoint cards performing poorly, some users even reported high cpu spikes while using the array - not exactly something you want to see when you spend $250 on a raid card.

Personally I purchased a LSI MegaRaid card with its own onboard xor processor, and 128mb cache onboard. Other good cards like the 3ware are out there too and if you are patient can be had for the same price range as the highpoint. I paid $200 on ebay for a brand new LSI megaraid 8 port, plus the LSI card supports port multipliers, allowing you to connect 4 hard drives to a port, for a very large expanded array(if needed) was quite the deal.

-Matt
 
Their conclusion is very strange. Compare 3-disk raid 0 and 4-disk raid 5 - STR appears to be almost exactly the same, as one would expect of a well-done RAID implementation. Not only that, but they don't measure CPU utilization during their testing. And they complain that raid 5 sucks for "database access patterns", which is true for pretty much all cases. I wouldn't put too much stock in that review, sorry.

As for CPU usage, well, yeah. It's a software raid stack. In order to get that good speed, they have to suck some CPU.

The LSI card isn't available so cheaply on eBay anymore.

 
I read several other reviews, which I don't have links for presently...Yeah sounds like im talkin out my ares I know.

I just was passing on what I read, and my opinions are just that. I'm sure it may be fine for some people, but some reported it being slower than their onboard raid solutions. Who knows, until someone provides actual cpu utilization comparisons its hard to say...
 
There can be only one :p That review is very comprehensive, although it's starting to show its age (16 months or so...). It doesn't have the 2320 but it does include the 1820, the little brother. Does fairly well in large-block tests like file server stuff and whatnot, and kills everyone in the STR test, albeit at 100% CPU usage.

 
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