RAID 2 HDD's with 2 different speeds?

[Polraudio]

I have these 2 HDD's that are 500gb and have 2 different speeds. One is 5400rpms and the other is 7200rpms. Would it be possible to RAID them or do they need to be the same speed? This RAID will be mostly used for games and network sharing.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: My mobo does support raid. Will be doing a raid0

 

[Old Hippie]

AFAIK they will do RAID0 but perform at the lowest specs of any drive in the array.

IMHO, it'd be a waste of time and run slower in your situation.

 

[Emulex]

you can raid them for sure no problems - a 2 platter 500gb might reach a lessor areal density 7200 at the fastest zone. go for it. made good backups of course.

 

[Jeff7181]

Dumb idea. Throughput is not the most important factor in hard drive performance, latency is. You'll get better performance if you use the 7200 PM drive for your OS and games and put data on the 5400 RPM drive for your network share.

 

[Polraudio]

Dumb idea. Throughput is not the most important factor in hard drive performance, latency is. You'll get better performance if you use the 7200 PM drive for your OS and games and put data on the 5400 RPM drive for your network share.

I already have a 1tb 7200rpm drive for my OS a 320gb 7200rpm drive for my documents and a 360gb 7200rpm drive for storing other stuff and 2 500gb hdd's that are in the topic here.(5 HDDS in my desktop:sneaky

Would there be any speed increase at all using 2 different speed Hdd's or should i just keep them separate?

 

[Emulex]

throw them in a drobo

 

[BrightCandle]

I have done this for various different reasons in the past with wildly different combinations of drives. The outcome has always been different but universally I've found the following:

1) Peak performance in any aspect will never reach the same as when the drives are identical, its at best twice the slowest (raid 0) but often much below that.

2) The lowest performance indicator can be considerably below twice the slowest drive.

3) Random access can suffer badly, often so much that having a single drive would have been better.

I have never kept a system with different drives in it for very long, its always been a stop gap until I find an identical drive.

But what I would say is its quick to test with something like CrystalDisk giving a good indication of the drives individually and combined so you may as well see what happens in this case.

 

[Emulex]

i had to replace an old scsi setup and all i could get new was a 36gb 10K , the rest of the server was 9gb 7200 - the battery back write cache maybe helped but never had a problem, performance didn't really change nor did reliability. server ran for years that way until it was retired to the garbage can.