Question about RAID

agavrilescu · May 9, 2013

Hi guys,

I have a question and I hope someone can help, I have just purchased 2 storage drives, one of them is an 256 GB UltraPlus sata III SSD from Sandisk and the other is a 1TB Western Digital 7200 64MB SATA3 (WD10EZEX).

I also have an old Western Digital 320GB, 7200 RPM, SATA II with this model no. WD3200AAJS-00RYA0.

Now my question is can I use the 2 mechanical drives in RAID 0 and if I do will I benefit from any increase in speed since they are both Western Digital and have the same 7200 RPM but one is SATA III and one is SATA II?

Just to mention my motherboard at the moment (not for long) is DFI Lanparty X48 T3RS and from what i can understand from the manual should support RAID 0.

Thank you very much.

Conelton · May 9, 2013

As far as I know, it may work depending on your motherboard, but it's not really worth it. You wouldn't be able to use all of the storage space because only the size of the smallest drive is used on each drive in the array, i.e. you would have 320GB on each drive = 640GB total. And the speed improvements would be slight if any. If you need speedy storage you have an SSD anyway, so I don't personally see the point. If you do want to try it though, there's only one way to find out for sure whether it will work and that's to do it.

agavrilescu · May 9, 2013

As far as I know, it may work depending on your motherboard, but it's not really worth it. You wouldn't be able to use all of the storage space because only the size of the smallest drive is used on each drive in the array, i.e. you would have 320GB on each drive = 640GB total. And the speed improvements would be slight if any. If you need speedy storage you have an SSD anyway, so I don't personally see the point. If you do want to try it though, there's only one way to find out for sure whether it will work and that's to do it.

Thank you very much, i just realised now tafter reading your post that i will get only 640GB instead of 1320GB, I didn't know before that this is the way it works, so many thanks for pointing that out to me,

So no RAID in this case.

Once again thanks.