Noob Q's about RAID 1 using mismatched HDs

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I would probs go for the new 750 WD black's,
Im not really a fan of using old hhd especially in raid due to the increased risk of errors.
I personally would pay the extra $80 for a little piece of mind
Hope this helps !
Let me know if you have more questions

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The 'old' HDs are only 1 yr old, one being less than 6months old, so I'm not too worried about errors, and in RAID 1, I don't have to worry about losing everything. So aside from you feeling more secure, what other reason is there that the 750gb WD black would be better

I don't have 'other' questions, just the same first 3 questions you quoted, but failed to address.

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If you use the 320GB and 250GB in RAID-1, you end up with 250GB of usable space. RAID-1 is mirroring, and the amount of space you get is the smallest of the two drives.

Even if performance is not a concern, I would at least match manufacturer and drive size for RAID-1, otherwise you're just wasting space, and 320GB drives are more worth it than 250GB drives. 320GB of redundant data is probably enough for you.

Moving forward... not quite sure what to suggest really. All your drives are mismatched. I'd probably end up buying a second 320GB drive to match the one, and then another WD Caviar Black drive for main use. The 2x320GB would be in RAID-1 to protect my "critical" stuff.

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Thanks for clarification on that. So if i run in RAID 0, is that when you get the total space of all HDs?

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You say 'at least', but isn't that going 'all-out'? I don't think you can get better than 2 duplicate drives, right? I'm using the same Make and Model, just a slight diff in drive size, and these are the two sizes that I already have.

And I'm not really trippin about 70GB of 'wasted space' because most people on here seem to recommend short stroking anyways.

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To clarify, I only have 2 drives. 1 - 320GB WD Blue and 1-250GB WD Blue. I'm looking to buy a 500GB WD Black. I looked on Newegg and the 320GB WD Blue was on sale for $45. The 500GB WD Black is only $20 more.

SO, that's why i was asking about the hit to performance, because I'm not spending money for another inferior HD.

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You're probably not going to notice that big of a performance boost going with WD Blue in RAID-0. I've never bought any Blue drives since they're mainstream and the warranty period is shorter.

To answer your question, if you run RAID-0 on your Blue drives, yes, there'll be a slight performance hit because of the difference in platter-count between the two hard-drives. Would it be noticeable? Probably not, not for real-world performance.

In terms of "real-world" performance, you're probably better getting two brand-new WD Black HDDs and putting those in RAID-0. And yes, you will appreciate the boost in speed over a single-drive setup. I have that setup, and it's just about fast as a single OCZ SSD on read speeds. Then take your old Blue hard-drives and put them in RAID-1 mirror, or run each as a single, as a means of data backup. Anytime you run RAID-0, best to have some form of backup somewhere "just in case" =P.

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My question actually was if I would notice enough of a difference in speed between RAIDing my Blues and RAIDing 2 new Blacks to make up the $80 difference in price.

I'm slightly confused by your response because on one hand you say that I won't notice a difference RAIDing my blues, but then when talking about RAIDing the blacks, you say that I'll appreciate the difference in speed over a single-drive setup.

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It's really hard to answer your question about whether or not you'll notice an $80-worth of difference in performance. How would you quantify $80 worth of performance to start with?

For me, if I had the money for new drives, I'd go with Blacks simply because they're (1) performance-oriented drives and more importantly, (2) the warranty period on the Black drives are 5-years instead of the 3-years on Blues. I don't expect the drives to fail, but if they do, at least they're covered over a period of 5 years instead of 3 years.

Anyways, moving forward. You're *not* going to notice a doubling of performance in I/O operations against your hard-drives if you put them in RAID-0. In fact, you're probably also not going to notice a huge difference on daily activities. Computer might boot up faster initially, but that's probably due to a clean Windows install. Your games would probably load a bit quicker. And you might notice a slightly snappier performance when you're opening programs. That's *real-world" performance. The system would probably defrag a bit quicker too.

All I'm saying is that you shouldn't expect anything mega-huge by switching to RAID-0 *for your uses*.

Since you're not one of those crazies on this forum that benchmarks for fun, and tries to squeeze every dollop of performance out of his rig, just go with whatever you can afford. If adding the one 750GB drive is enough additional storage, then just do that. At the very least, you'll gain some experience when you put your Blues in RAID. You can then use HD Tune and compare your benchmarks against those posted by other people and their configurations, and then decide for yourself if you've really noticed any significant performance increase.

Then later on, you can decide if you want to try RAID-0 with WD Blacks and see if you notice another difference. Noticeable performance gains are hugely subjective anyways.

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I dunno, good question.

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All things considered, I don't have money for even 1 drive, but I did it cause it was on sale. I figured that I can always buy another down the road, but having only 25gigs left kinda made me pull the trigger.

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Good advice. Thank you