RAID 1 with slow and fast drive

[tolk]

Hi,

I've got two HDD installed in my machine. One is my primary drive, the other is an older and slower (rpm) drive from an external HDD (I recovered after one of the external control boards for the external failed). Having no experience of RAID setups my questions are:

1) Can I RAID two same size but different speed drives?
2) Can I go from my current single disk system to a RAID system without having to reinstall everything, and if so how?
3) Will having one slow drive and one fast drive in RAID 1 give any performance increase, or will the slower drive bottleneck the faster? Would I be better off with some incremental backup software If I wanted to backup the contents of my primary drive rather than putting the two drives in RAID?

System Specs:
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EX38-DS4
CPU: Core 2 Duo E8400
GPU: Gigabyte 9800 GTX

 

[WyomingKnott]

1) yes
2) Try this article: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/196922-32-switching-storage-controllers-reinstalling-windows
3) The slower drive will bottleneck the faster in writes. You may see some improvement in reads. OBLIGATORY WARNING: RAID1 is not a substitute for backups. Even with your data in RAID1, you must do backups to prevent against such disasters as accidental overwriting of data you need, malware attacks, massive power surges from lightning, and a PC being destroyed by rain coming in an open window.

If you are only going to do one of the two, do backups. If you are going to do both, do backups.

(Edit: I am aware of the logical flaw in the last sentence. I did it that way for effect.)