Two slightly different drives in raid 0

[tommydyhr]

Hi.

I'm considering running a raid-array on my system drive, as the file-system is becoming a serious bottleneck in my system.
Currently I have a Western Digital Caviar Black (WD5001AALS) as system drive, and I'd like to add another similar drive. I was in fact able to find this drive, but at a quite higher price than the newer, slightly faster Caviar Black WD5002AALX model. The capacity and spindle speed is the same and they actually seem very similar.

Would this pose any problem at all?

 

[tommydyhr]

Oh yeah, and it's probably worth mentioning the WD5001 runs ATA-300, whilst the WD5002 runs ATA-600.

 

[johnnyq1233]

Well you might not have any problems setting up the array but you'll slow down the ata600 drive to ata300 to match the slower drive....
I would probably get a second ata600 for the array and use the older one as a backup or media drive.
Reply back if you have any further concerns...JQ

 

[tommydyhr]

Can you really feel the difference between 300 and 600 on a conventional hard drive?

I honestly thought only SSD's maxed out the ATA-300 bus.

 

[johnnyq1233]

More than likely you'll only notice the burst rate....and then it falls off to the mechanical limitations of the drive.