lol, I'm sure this isn't a good idea

[hell_spawn]

So I grab a pair of HDD and slap them in my rig and hook/configure them up RAID0 and everything works fine.... installed windows vista ultimate in 20min flat... the intresting thing is the 2 hard drives are 2 different sizes.... one being a 200GB and the other being a 250GB.... now I know this is probably not good pratice but I figured what the hell I had the spare 200GB just collecting dust.

Anyone want to give me the low-down on any issues I might encounter?

 

[chookman]

None... the 250gb drive will have 50gb wasted... the raid controller will never write to the 50gb that is over the size of the first drive.

 

[cpburns]

chookman hit it on the head. the extra 50GB is wasted. if you can handle that loss, go for it. the array will only perform as well as its weakest link. if you run raid on a pci controller, it'll max out at 115MB/s or so (assuming raid0). PCIe x1, 250MB/s. PCIe x8, well then i think it requires putting 24 drives on an Areca ARC1280ML to max out 2GB/s bandwidth

but the main point is that if you hypothetically raid a ATA/66 5400rpm 20GB drive that has a max transfer rate of 30MB/s with a SATA/150 150GB 10k rpm raptor, the array will only be 40GB in size, you'll be unable to use the extra 130GB on the raptor, and the max transfer rate will be in the neighborhood of 60MB/s.

so the array is slowed down to the speed of the lowest common denominator.

 

[joex444]

since the 200gb is as you said a spare that you already had, you don't actually lose any space. you gain 150GB by declaring the last 50GB of your 250 unused and then adding 200GB for free.

you should notice quicker transfer rates, but not necessarily quicker load times. some operations may perform faster, for example, photoshop with large image sizes, as it often swaps to HD for some reason.

oh, and, the regular thing where you double your chance of failure, esp when the 200gb is spare and, presumably, already has thousands of hours on it.