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How different can two RAID-1 disk be to work well together?
Hi,
In February I took the first step to upgrade my RAID-1 system 2x4TB running on ReadyNAS 314 and reaplaced one disk to a 8 TB.
At the time I bought a 5400 rpm disk from WD. To be exact it was a WDC WD80EFAX-68KNBO. Now when I want to upgrade the seocnd disk to a 8 TB disk I find it very hard. WD has discontinued the same disk and only has it for 7200 rpm. Seem most vendors has discontinued the 5400 rpm disks for 8 TB. I just wonde if I buy a 7200 rpm disk if that will have difficulty to cooperate with a 5400 rpm disk in RAID1?
Another aspect is cache and that was 256 MB in the 8 TB I bought. Likely good to have that in the other one too?
The compability list from Netgear I use is the followling
Thanks for your advice!
janpeter1 wrote:
I read in another thread that you could mix 7200 rpm and 5400 rpm disk in a RAID1-configuration and that means that the 7200 rpm disk will spin slower on 5400 rpm. And that is not a problem? You agree on that?
It shouldn't cause a problem (and when I replace one of my own WD 8 TB in the future, I will likely also end up with mixed speeds).
The 7200 rpm disk won't spin slower (it can't). But the RAID array can handle mismatched speeds (and mismatched cache sizes also are not a problem). Performance will be somewhere between a pure 5400 array and a pure 7200 array.
Though I am not mixing speeds at the moment, I have done this in the past with no difficulty.
3 Replies
You can just get the current 8 TB WD Red Plus (WD80EFBX). It will work fine, though the performance will be slightly less than if you had a pair of 7200 rpm drives.
janpeter1 wrote:
The compability list from Netgear I use is the followling
The 8 TB Barracuda is SMR, so don't use that one.
FWIW, Netgear's HCL is here: https://kb.netgear.com/20641/ReadyNAS-Hard-Disk-Compatibility-List But it's fine to just use a NAS-purposed drive (WD Red Plus, Seagate Ironwolf), or any enterprise-class SATA drive.
Hi,
Thank you for quick answer. Sorry copied and pasted the wrong infromation into the mail, but that Seagate disk was the 5400 rpm disk I easily could get hold of here. But I dropt it now.
I read in another thread that you could mix 7200 rpm and 5400 rpm disk in a RAID1-configuration and that means that the 7200 rpm disk will spin slower on 5400 rpm. And that is not a problem? You agree on that?
Thanks
Jan Peter
janpeter1 wrote:
I read in another thread that you could mix 7200 rpm and 5400 rpm disk in a RAID1-configuration and that means that the 7200 rpm disk will spin slower on 5400 rpm. And that is not a problem? You agree on that?
It shouldn't cause a problem (and when I replace one of my own WD 8 TB in the future, I will likely also end up with mixed speeds).
The 7200 rpm disk won't spin slower (it can't). But the RAID array can handle mismatched speeds (and mismatched cache sizes also are not a problem). Performance will be somewhere between a pure 5400 array and a pure 7200 array.
Though I am not mixing speeds at the moment, I have done this in the past with no difficulty.
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