RAID 5 Drive Requirements

[SpanishFry]

I have 4 250GB Maxtor 8MB drives in a RAID5 array. One of the drives just died and I'm thinking about replacing the drive with a 16MB Maxtor drive or a Seagate drive with a 5 yr. warranty. Will this work or do all 4 drives need to be EXACTLY identical?

Thanks.

 

[lansalot]

Depending on the driving hardware it will either work and you'll lose 8gb off that drive, or it won't work at all.

 

[SpanishFry]

Originally posted by: lansalot
Depending on the driving hardware it will either work and you'll lose 8gb off that drive, or it won't work at all.

Any way to tell?

 

[MobiusPizza]

Well it would work, however there might be a performance degrade

If the Segate drive has a capacity near to that of maxtor drive the performance degrade would be less

 

[SpanishFry]

Originally posted by: AnnihilatorX
Well it would work, however there might be a performance degrade

If the Segate drive has a capacity near to that of maxtor drive the performance degrade would be less

Yeah, I would replace it with a 250GB drive to match the other 3. Basically, I want Seagate's 5 yr. warranty because I just had my first drive fail in the array and it was out of warranty by 3 weeks on Maxtor's 1 yr. program.

 

[lansalot]

Sorry, I mis-read your initial post.

If you mean you have 3x250gb with 8mb cache's and want to replace one with a 16mb cache but still at 250gb, then yes it will work fine. There will be no degradation.

Somehow I thought you have 8gb drives and wanted to replace one with a 16gb, hence the 8gb loss. Ahem.

edit: incidentally, I've seen a few posts now where people claim that the capacity of the drive in a RAID setup will somehow affect the performance. This is rubbish.