Mismatched RAID drives

[jbo5112]

We've had a mirrored pair of 150GB Raptor drives for storing our database, but we've RMAed 3 of them in the past week! They can no longer get us the 150GB, but a newer 160GB Rapter (I don't think it's the VelociRaptor). Out of 4 150GB drives sitting in the server room, one 150GB drive still works fine, two have bad sectors, one won't even start, and we've already invested $45 on expedited shipping to get the machine moved this week, before a co-worker leaves on vacation. We are currently running Windows x64 with some sort of Adaptec software RAID on the motherboard, and are working on transitioning everything to Linux on this machine.

Will it cause any problems to run RAID1 with the 150GB drive and the 160GB drive? Tech support said it will just ignore the extra space on the newer drive and work fine. I don't doubt it functioning, but I'm concerned with performance. We resell these servers with custom software for data processing, and when the drives start filling up, they can barely keep up with the load at times because we don't want to spend 50% more money going to SAS/SCSI drives.

[deanjo]

We've had a mirrored pair of 150GB Raptor drives for storing our database, but we've RMAed 3 of them in the past week! They can no longer get us the 150GB, but a newer 160GB Rapter (I don't think it's the VelociRaptor). Out of 4 150GB drives sitting in the server room, one 150GB drive still works fine, two have bad sectors, one won't even start, and we've already invested $45 on expedited shipping to get the machine moved this week, before a co-worker leaves on vacation. We are currently running Windows x64 with some sort of Adaptec software RAID on the motherboard, and are working on transitioning everything to Linux on this machine.

Will it cause any problems to run RAID1 with the 150GB drive and the 160GB drive? Tech support said it will just ignore the extra space on the newer drive and work fine. I don't doubt it functioning, but I'm concerned with performance. We resell these servers with custom software for data processing, and when the drives start filling up, they can barely keep up with the load at times because we don't want to spend 50% more money going to SAS/SCSI drives.

Yes you can use the 160 as a substitute. While performance won't be a 100% optimal, any performance drop will be negligible.

Raptors as a whole (from experience having many servers with them in the past) are not great server drives. While being slightly faster then a 7200 RPM drive they seem like they can't take the beating that a good quality 7200 RPM drive can take. They claim they are enterprise class, but personal experience says otherwise. 21 dead raptors within 1 year with 9 surviving. We replaced those last 9 before they went bad.

[jbo5112]

Thanks, that's good to know. I've seen more drives die in the past year than I can keep track of, but this is the first time we've seen a problem with the raptors in the 18 months we've owned them. The person we talked to about the return said they had a return rate of 6% which was about normal, but perhaps I should do some more research before we buy more. I've got an old 2" 10k SCSI drive that didn't get as hot as those raptors (gotta love ebay).

[Redeeman]

also, except for the obvious seektime performance, modern 7200rpm drives outperform the normal raptors.. Seagate 500GB gives 115MB/s for the first 100gb or so..

[deanjo]

also, except for the obvious seektime performance, modern 7200rpm drives outperform the normal raptors.. Seagate 500GB gives 115MB/s for the first 100gb or so..

not to mention on a server where multithreaded reads are involved many 7200 RPM drives are faster then the raptor which can be very important on a server setup.