WD10EADS WD Caviar Green - 1TB >> excessive Load Cycle Count

lindebrand wrote:
Asking the same question as in my last post: Is there any advantages of having two identical discs instead of two different?

No real advantage. Indeed, the ReadyNAS is designed expecting that users will not have identical disks. This makes it very easy to grow the size of the array.

There is one 'soft' benefit of having two identical: you can watch the SMART parameters and perhaps tell if one of the drives is beginning to fail by comparing their SMART stats. All drive vendors do not implement/measure the various parameters the same way, so it can be hard to compare some of the numbers side by side on dissimilar drives.

There is a disadvantage. If you have two identical drives and they both have the same design defect, there is a chance that you could lose both of them at the same time, and then 'poof' your RAID redundancy is gone. I'm thinking of the Seagate drives with the known brick-my-drive firmware flaw earlier this year (I had one of them). But statistically, the chance of a fatal firmware defect killing both drives at the same time is vanishingly small. You're more likely to lose all your data from a lightning strike zapping your entire system, or from theft.