I'm in a pretty confusing situation here, I need help

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Well, I took it for granted that my brother's 20gig drive was a 7200rpm drive since a few years back the salesman tried to sell us an extended warranty claiming that these companies try to push their hard drive speeds and that this specific model pushed its 7200rpm drive to 8000rpm. Yup, BS.

Anyway, in MY computer, not my brother's, I have a 20Gig 7200 RPM Maxtor drive, Linky.

Today, we bought a 120gig drive for like $40 after rebate at Officemax because I planned to upgrade to a Raid setup in about 5 weeks when school is out and when I upgrade the rest of my computer. Well, for a raid setup we need 2 identical drives, but usually two drives of the same speed, size, cache, etc. work. I was planning on using my Maxtor, and his Seagate 20gb drive. Due to my curiosity, I looked up the model number on their website, Linky, and guess what? Its a 5400rpm drive.


Sorry for the long post, but does anyone have any idea what to do? I'll hold off on mailing the UPC code for the drive because if worst comes to worst, I'll just have to buy another 20gig drive which I bet will end up being the same price since noone is selling it cheaper and return the 120GB since we have no need for that much space, but it would also make my brother unhappy because going to an 8mb cache drive 7200rpm from a 2mb cache 5400rpm drive is a big change.

Ebay doesn't seem to have them very cheap either. With a raid 0 setup using those 2x 20 gig drives can I get performance of atleast 2x 5400 rpm drives? Also, how will the Raid card handle two drives with different speeds? Will it just keep waiting for data from the 5400rpm drive and then send it or will it even take the 2 different speed drives?

 

[xSauronx]

i dont think this sounds like a good idea, mixing and matching drives for a raid setup...i dunno, just doesnt sound right to me

anyway *bump* maybe someone who really knows can answer you, i havent gotten to the hard drive part of my A+ book yet

 

[kursplat]

i believe your just going to run at the slowest drives speed . if it's all you could afford for now then ok, but thinking you'll never need the 120 gigs of space is , to me , short sighted.
what kind of raid were you going to go ? stripes or redundant? if it's for redundancy i wouldn't worry too much about it. stripping for speed? i bet the single 7200 drive won't be noticably slower.
good luck

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Originally posted by: kursplat
i believe your just going to run at the slowest drives speed . if it's all you could afford for now then ok, but thinking you'll never need the 120 gigs of space is , to me , short sighted.
what kind of raid were you going to go ? stripes or redundant? if it's for redundancy i wouldn't worry too much about it. stripping for speed? i bet the single 7200 drive won't be noticably slower.
good luck

I was thinking of striping for speed since I have another 60gig drive which I can back them up to daily or every other day in the middle of the night or something. Any ideas?

Also, IF it does work with the RAID card, what kind of performance can I expect? Would I just be getting a theoretical speed of a 10,800 RPM drive or the speed of a drive somewhere between 10,800rpm and 14,400 rpm drive?

I've always thought that hard drives simply can't be lowered or raised in their rotational speed because of how sensitive they are and thats why noone has ever really overclocked or underclocked their hard drive.

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

So will these two drives at different speeds work together in a Raid 0 setup?

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

^

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Come on... there must be someone who knows about this... anyone? :beer:

 

[mrzed]

I think your question was basically answered already it *should* work, but because the transfer rate is limited to 2X the speed of the slowest drive, you'd get almost the same performance from just using the faster one by itself. Also, the performance only increases for sustained transfer rates. For most people, you'll notice when loading levels in games, loading OS, etc.