Mixing a SATA150 with 2 SATA3.0s in a RAID1

[btsdev]

Hey guys,

I have an existing 74gig raptor (sata150) that I want to put in a desktop I'll be building (for my OS), but I also want to have a RAID1 consisting of 2 new 500gig SATA3.0 drives I'm planning on purchasing. I'm choosing SATA3.0 so I can get drives down the line when I have a failure and SATA150s aren't out there anymore; also the 3.0 drives are cheaper.

Question: Can I have 3 SATA drives plugged in with a mixed (150/3.0) setup like this, but only use 2 of them in a RAID configuration?

thanks,
brian

 

[yiranhu]

That shouldn't be a problem. The raid 1 drives will just become one 500 gb drive while the raptor will be by itself.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I have used Hitachi 200gb hard in a RAID 5 array in which some were SATA300 and others were SATA150. Didn't have a problem in the least.

 

[btsdev]

awesome. thanks guys!

 

[lopri]

What is your motherboard? And OS?

Modern boards shouldn't have a problem with the configuration you want to set up, but with some boards, you might need to take a work-around. NF4 boards, specifically, tends to RAID the boot partition first. NF5/6 don't show this problem. I think it's because NF4 had PATA RAID function as well as SATA RAID.

 

[btsdev]

I actually haven't picked out a motherboard yet -- looking at these boards now, I'm sorta reluctant to pick one and be rendered not be able to use my agp geforce 6800... but I guess I'm going to have to switch completely to pci express since all of these sata3.0 boards are pci express only. For an OS, I'll be running ubuntu or debian. Thanks for the NF4/5/6 tip.

 

[ch33zw1z]

SATAII(v2.0, a.k.a. 3.0Gbps due to it's speed) controllers are backwards compatible with SATAI(v1.0, a.k.a. 1.50Gbps) hard drives. This means that the controller will automatically use SATAI speeds for SATAI drives, and SATAII speeds for SATAII drives. It won't affect your array setup at all, especially since both your drives are SATAII...your entire array will be running at SATAII speeds.

 

[gramboh]

It is fine because with SATA, each device has it's own channel so it doesn't matter if you have SATA1 device on one channel and SATA2 on another channel. The two channels used in RAID will be in the same mode as you mentioned.