Is it okay to use differnt brand HDs in a RAID?

[CountryBumkin]

I'm building a hardware RAID using eight 3TB drives - but the drives are not identical. Four drives are WD Red (5400rpm) and the other four are HGST DeskStar 7K300 (7200rpm). The size is the same.

Will this be a problem?

It will be either a RAID6 or RAID10 (I'm still deciding which is right for me), if that matters in the question above.

 

[Elixer]

You could if you want, it has the controller doing more work if the drives aren't the same specs, since the controller needs to wait for the slowest device.

Some RAID cards will not allow this, some do.

I would split your RAID up to match the drives though.

 

[probedb2]

My RocketRAID card appears to be fine running a mix. I'm slowly swapping the older Samsung drives I have.

 

[XavierMace]

Will it work? Probably. Is it recommended? Definitely not.

 

[CountryBumkin]

Thanks for your replies.
I'm going to create two different arrays, each with the same model drives. I have two controllers so I can do this - although that was not the original plan. But the purpose of the RAID is to provide data protection/redundancy so I don't start out with a potential problem.

So I will do two RAID6 arrays with four 3TB same-model drives in each, and expand the arrays later using the same model/brand drives.

 

[XavierMace]

You don't need two controllers for that. One RAID controller will support more than one array.