RAID question

[Daioh]

So im thinking of setting up RAID on my desktop. My question is about 32mb and 64mb caching. From what i know there really isnt much difference between the two but that's not really my problem. I currently have a 1tb 32mb WD caviar black HDD and was wondering if it mattered if I used raid with this and a 1tb 64mb WD caviar black HDD. Will it be compatible this way? The reason im getting a 64mb is because i ordered one off newegg a while back and they sent me a bad one so im kinda stuck on getting the same type again when i send it back. That is unless i refund my money but that only seems necessary if there is a problem with doing this.

Long story short

Is it compatible?

Is it faster to have two 32mb instead of a 32mb and 64mb?

Also does it matter which one is my primary?

I've never set up raid before so sorry if this is kind of a newbie question.

 

[jitpublisher]

Will it work, absolutely. You can put ANY drives into RAID (as long as they will plug into the same controller anyway)
For optimum disk usage, value, and performance, of course it is reasonable and preferred to use identical drives.
These 2 drives will work just fine, any speed difference between these drives and two drives with the same cache amount would be insignificantly tiny.

 

[geofelt]

It will work, but... What do you wish to accomplish with raid?

For raid-1(mirroring) consider:
The value of raid-1 and it's variants like raid-5 is that you can recover from a drive failure quickly. It is for servers that can not tolerate any interruption.
Modern hard drives have a advertised mean time to failure on the order of 500,000+ hours. That is something like 50 years.
With raid-1 you are protecting yourself from specifically a hard drive failure. Not from other failures such as viruses, operator error,
malware, fire, theft, etc.
For that, you need external backup. If you have external backup, you do not need raid-1

For raid-0(striping):
Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates. It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential manner.

 

[jitpublisher]

^Agree. Though I didn't get into any advice about RAID in my last post, I will agree that for most people, RAID is pretty pointless. If you want speed, get an SSD.
RAID is highly overrated as a performance item. Like I have said many times, years ago when drives were small and painfully slow, and 512mb of memory was a bunch, RAID could make a huge and noticeable difference. With today's faster drives, and most people running 4-8gig of memory or even more, RAID is really pretty pointless.

 

[Daioh]

thanks for the replys. The only reason i was thinking of doing raid was because i was going to be stuck with another 1tb hdd. im thinking of just refunding it and getting an SSD any recommendations on what kind i should get. My pc is primarily for gaming so i would like to be able to store my os (windows 7 professional 64bit) and some of my games. Also are SSDs being affected by the big harddrive price increase?

 

[geofelt]

thanks for the replys. The only reason i was thinking of doing raid was because i was going to be stuck with another 1tb hdd. im thinking of just refunding it and getting an SSD any recommendations on what kind i should get. My pc is primarily for gaming so i would like to be able to store my os (windows 7 professional 64bit) and some of my games. Also are SSDs being affected by the big harddrive price increase?

No, it seems that SSD prices are still dropping. Now might just be a great time to unload an unneeded large hard drive.

My preference for reliability is Intel or Samsung. They make their own nand chips.

 

[Daioh]

Best answer selected by Daioh.