Raid 0 question

[gee-the-frog]

Hey. I have a WD green 500Gb 32Mb Cache and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500Gb 16Mb Cache HDDs'. I very much doubt I will ever fill up ONE 500gb hard drive let alone two, and considering I don't really want the second HDD sitting around doing nothing at all I thought I might set them up in a raid0 configuration. (you are probably wondering why i even have two in the first place: I just got the second one back from warranty which I sent away a year ago.) I know its better to use identical hard drives in raid setups but I was going to set up a raid 0 config anyway. My question is about the cache sizes. one is 32 and the other is 16. I have no idea what the cache does and I was wondering if they will work in raid0 and what the drawbacks will be if I use these two HDD's in raid0.

 

[sminlal]

The cache sizes of the drives don't matter - you can put them both into RAID 0 without any problems.

RAID 0 can improve transfer rates, but is less reliable than a single hard drive. If EITHER drive of a RAID 0 set fails, you will loose ALL your data.

If your data is important to you then a better use for the second hard drive would probably be to put it into an external enclosure and use it for backups.