RAID 1'ing drives of differing quality and size

[manofchalk]

Hello good people of the Storage forum, I usually don't venture outside the Systems forum but I need your help with something (two things actually).

I am considering RAID1 arrays on both my boot SSD and storage HDD (because I am very lazy with backups), I have other HDD's I can use, but here lies the problem.

I have a 128GB SSD and a 250GB HDD (That is quite old),[strike] I was wondering if its even possible to RAID1 these drives together considering the differing sizes[/strike] (Just read the sticky, got my answer), and would the HDD drag down the SSD's performance if I did? [strike]Also is it possible to RAID a partition of the 250GB with the SSD? That way I can use the extra 120GB's.[/strike] I really should have read the sticky before posting shouldn't I?

And the next one I'm sure is fairly basic, two 1TB HDD's, again one is a bit old and I'm fairly sure doesn't perform as well as the new one. Will RAID 1'ing these drives slow the modern drive down?

The motherboard I'm using is the AsRock Z77 Extreme4, which apparently supports RAID 0 through 10 (No 6 though) on all the SATA ports.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157293

Thanks for the help.

 

[tomatthe]

"And the next one I'm sure is fairly basic, two 1TB HDD's, again one is a bit old and I'm fairly sure doesn't perform as well as the new one. Will RAID 1'ing these drives slow the modern drive down?"

Yes the raid set would be limited by the speed of the slower drive. You might consider doing something like a nightly backup from the quicker drive to the slower drive rather then using raid. It would take a bit of extra work to get that setup, but once it was in place it should manage itself. Obviously this would only serve as a nightly backup of the drive not a continual backup.

 

[manofchalk]

So I assume the HDD/SSD RAID would kill the performance of it?

Any software you can recommend for the backups? As I'v heard the Windows utility isnt all that great.

 

[tomatthe]

Crashplan pro is free for doing local backups, and very easy to setup, and yes the hdd/sdd would kill the performance of the ssd.

 

[dingo07]

RAID arrays should be the exact same drive - same cache, spindle speed, and obviously size, as mentioned above, the slowest drive becomes the standard

 

[manofchalk]

Best answer selected by manofchalk.