RAID Question

[megadarkwood]

Do the drives in RAID have to be the same size?

Also, can you raid IDE drives?

[CoolBeans]

Yes

Why?

[megadarkwood]

Yes

Why?

I have a bunch of old IDE drives lying around

 

Thanks for the quick answer

[Godlygamer23]

Drives do not have to be the same size. However, the largest drive will be limited to the smallest drive's capacity in the RAID 0 config.

[IdeaStormer]

Its not a full out yes. Yes it would be ideal, is a better answer. I have used different sized disks in RAID 1 and RAID 0 setups, mainly did that due to cost as in customer not wanting to buy to new disks as they had one drive and wanted to go cheap(er) and use it and a new drive. Of course the new drives are basically larger in size on average than something from two or so years ago so (and yes I could of looked around for the same exact size but time was of the essence), so in one case I had a 320 Gig and a 1.5 TB drive in RAID 0, yes only 320 Gig of the 1.5 TB drive were used but the customer didn't care and actually didn't even have the 320 gig drive more than 40% used to begin with they just wanted a faster system for the least amount of dough. Same for RAID 1, the overlap is just wasted but still doable, again depends on the situation, not everyone is going to buy new drives for their RAID array (even if they should), economics plays a factor in the real world. But, if you have the cash then yea, buy two identical drives so you don't waste the space on the larger drive.