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Is Raid 1 speed limited to your slowest drive?

PCPartPickerPro9171787
By PCPartPickerPro9171787
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Is Raid 1 speed limited to your slowest drive? For instance if you have a Raid 1 on a SSD as your primary devise and a Hard Drive as back up, will the speed be limited by the hard drive? 

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The drives have to be identical to use RAID 1, or at least in speeds.

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The drives have to be identical to use RAID 1, or at least in speeds.

I don't think so. The slowest drive will be your limit.

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Is Raid 1 speed limited to your slowest drive? For instance if you have a Raid 1 on a SSD as your primary devise and a Hard Drive as back up, will the speed be limited by the hard drive? 

RAID 1 is intended for mirroring drives. When the RAID controller(software or hardware) is copying data from one drive to another, the slowest drive is always the limit. In your particular case, the hard drive would be the weakest link.

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I don't think so. The slowest drive will be your limit.

For the best experience, it's recommended. Also using RAID 1 with an SSD and a HDD would make having an SSD pointless as your speeds will run at that of the HDD.

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For the best experience, it's recommended. Also using RAID 1 with an SSD and a HDD would make having an SSD pointless as your speeds will run at that of the HDD.

Not necessarily. That is only when copying data from the SSD to the hard drive. The speed of the SSD in read only operations should be unchanged. Writes would be a different story. Same with deletions.

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Not necessarily. That is only when copying data from the SSD to the hard drive. The speed of the SSD in read only operations should be unchanged. Writes would be a different story. Same with deletions.

It really depends on the RAID controller as not all manufacturers have implemented ways to mitigate the effect of having a slower drive. Some controllers will read from the drive with smallest write-queue first, while other controllers don't have this feature. The best option would to just have automatic backups instead of using RAID 1 in this case.

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Is Raid 1 speed limited to your slowest drive? For instance if you have a Raid 1 on a SSD as your primary devise and a Hard Drive as back up, will the speed be limited by the hard drive? 

 

Hey there :)
 
RAID generally limits the speed of all drives in the array to the one of the slowest drive and the capacity of all drives to the one with the smallest. Given your example, your SSD would work with the speed of the HDD and the capacity of the HDD will be limited to the one of the SSD (provided the SSD is smaller).
I would suggest to simply configure a continuous backup with a software program from the SSD to the HDD in order not to lose performance or capacity. I could suggest checking WD SmartWare for this purpose: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=8ffWiW
 
Captain_WD.

If this helped you, like and choose it as best answer - you might help someone else with the same issue. ^_^
WDC Representative, http://www.wdc.com/ 

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