IDE RAID 1 using mixed size drives

[Andy Nugent]

I've got a couple of IDE hard drives lying around (1 x 40GB and 1 x 60GB)
but no spare IDE slots in my PC.

I've seen a fairly cheap "2 port IDE RAID (0,1) ATA133 PCI card".
Unfortunately the shop doesn't give details of the manufacturer of this
card.

Can anyone tell be if they've tried (and succeeded or failed) to put mixed
size drives in a RAID 1 formation?

I'm guessing it would be possible as long as you only used the equivelent of
the smallest drive for all drives (in my case 40GB from each drive giving me
an 80GB drive).

 

[Brent Wood]

I've got a couple of IDE hard drives lying around (1 x 40GB and 1 x 60GB)
but no spare IDE slots in my PC.

I've seen a fairly cheap "2 port IDE RAID (0,1) ATA133 PCI card".
Unfortunately the shop doesn't give details of the manufacturer of this
card.

Can anyone tell be if they've tried (and succeeded or failed) to put mixed
size drives in a RAID 1 formation?

I'm guessing it would be possible as long as you only used the equivelent of
the smallest drive for all drives (in my case 40GB from each drive giving me
an 80GB drive).

RAID 1 will duplicate the data across the drives, so your two 40Gb
partitions become one 40Gb RAID1 partition. So from a space perspective
you are worse off than if you just use the 60Gb drive, but the data is
theoretically more secure.

A RAID 0 will give you 40 +40 or 80GB of faster striped data, but it is
less secure than a single drive.

You may well find that the controller will allow you to mount the drives
as non-RAID seoarate drives much as a normal controller does. This would
give you 40+60=100 Gb of storage in two partitions.