Different drives in Raid 5?

[thermocoffee]

Hi guys. Quick question. I have a raid 5 with five 1TB RE4. I wanted to get an additional couple TBs. Can I buy a 2TB RE4 and stick it in my raid? I don't mind rebuilding the raid (everything is backed up). So is it possible (and stable) to run different size drives in a raid 5? thanks!

 

[stickmansam]

any drives will work together but they all need to be the same size

 

[thermocoffee]

Great thanks! I'll just buy two 1tb drives then. Appreciate it!

 

[thermocoffee]

Best answer selected by thermocoffee.

 

[popatim]

The 2 tb drive will work but only 1 tb of the drive will be used and you will have no access to the other 1tb on the drive. Raids can only use the size of the smallest drive to build with. ie a 10mb drive and a 10tb drive in raid0 will create a 20mb raid0 (2*10mb) . In your case your smallest drive is 1tb.

The formula to calculate the size of a raid5 is (N-1)*Smin where N is the number of drives and Smin is the size of the smallest drive.