Question about using Mismatched Drives for RAID

[havokator]

Is there any reason why I shouldn't run 3 2TB drives that are from different manufacturers in an onboard ICH10R RAID5 array?

All 3 drives are 2TB, one is a WD20EARS and 2 are Samsung Spinpoint F4's.

I know it is best to run all the same exact drives in RAID, but I was wondering why? It seems like you have a higher chance of 2 or more drives failing at the same time if all the drives are from the exact same manufacturer/batch.

 

[True]

Running all 3 of the same exact drives can have benefits and downfalls.

Benefits are that drives perform similarly; latencies tend not to be as high and many RAID firmwares expect similar drives for performance and can't compensate well. This tends to only affect small, random reads and writes. This said, this isn't a big issue anymore.

Downfalls include that if there is a defect in a range of a model produced from the manufacturer, and you own drives made in this range, chance of failure of more than one drive at the same time rises greatly.

In short, especially if it's a networked fileserver, you shouldn't have a problem at all running those three drives in a RAID together.