RAID and old drives?

[Guest]

On a forum discussing a review of a Seagate 160GB SATA drive, someone says
"also think of using them in a RAID when they get old". Is there something
wrong or unwise about using new drives in a RAID?

 

[S.Heenan]

On a forum discussing a review of a Seagate 160GB SATA drive, someone
says "also think of using them in a RAID when they get old". Is there
something wrong or unwise about using new drives in a RAID?

RAID levels 0,1, and 0+1 are most common in consumer grade products. Within
these three, only 0+1 offers fault tolerance on a par with RAID5. RAID0 is
the fastest. Since hard drives often fail within the first few hundred hours
of operation (infant mortality), perhaps the reviewer was referring to this
fact. No matter what type of RAID you decide upon, make frequent backups to
be on the safe side.

 

[DaveW]

No; new drives are wonderful for RAID. And faster!

 

[kony]

On a forum discussing a review of a Seagate 160GB SATA drive, someone says
"also think of using them in a RAID when they get old". Is there something
wrong or unwise about using new drives in a RAID?

I can only speculate that they might want a mirrored array so if
either drive fails the data is still intact.

There is nothing wrong with using new drives, it's the best
alternative but due to cost constraints and waste of working hardware
you might as well do *something* useful with the older drives.


Dave

 

[Mitochondrion]

Yes, i would go with striped RAID with parity checking. Assuming that
the drives you are going to use are all the same size/type preferably
exact same as each other. But if you are looking to be storing alot of
data, I wouldn't want to rely on the older hardware (what if 2 go...)