Question about mixing HD's in a server

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dar124

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So I currently have 2 2TB WD Green drives and a 250GB Seagate Barracuda as storage drives in my WHS 2011 server. The only reason that the 250GB drive is in there is because I had it just sitting around when I was putting the server together. I'm finally ready to get another 2TB drive to replace the Seagate and I'd like to stick with a WD drive.

The WD Red drives came out shortly after I set up this server. I leaning towards going with a WD 2TB Red, but I wasnt sure if there would be any issues with mixing the red and greens?? I wouldnt think there wouldnt be any problems, but figured that I'd check here with the forum. Thanks in advance.
 
I wouldn't bother with Reds unless you plan on putting them in a RAID given they're designed around being in a RAID environment. (TLER == they'll give up quickly on any read errors, not good if they're not in a redundant environment)

Far as mixing drives goes: the general answer is it'll be fine but one can't be too specific without more info. Some schools of though for RAIDs go is that you want to mix drives in case you get a bad batch so there's less of a chance you'll get multiple failures.
anyway, just some hopefully relevant rambling there.
 
Personally I've got a 3TB red on my desktop, along with a 256GB SSD ! It didn't cost much more and even if I have backups I don't use RAID or similar since the idea is to get a discreet machine so a bit more peace of mind and warranty was worth it, my ZFS build on the other hand has green and 7200rpm drives.
 
At work I have several mixed linux software raid6 7200 RPM SATA arrays (using WDC BLACK, Hitachi 7K, Toshiba Enterprise, Seagate Constellation ES.3). At home I do not raid my HTPC data but have individual 2TB hitachi, 2TB WDC greens, 2TB Samsung F4s and 4TB Seagate and 4TB Hitachi externals all used for data storage and backups for the HTPC.

In both cases the mixing was not on purpose but came out of availability. At work we have an "approved vendor" which limits my choices.
 
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