Software RAID1 Drives

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I have 3 4TB WD drives I want to put in a RAID1 array.

Two WD4000FYYZ

and

One WD4000F9YZ

All enterprise class but two are WD Re and one is WD Se. I ordered the first two thinking 2 drives in the raid array would be sufficient but later decided its a long drive to the server so I would rather have 3 drives and ordered a third in accidentally did not get EXACT
same thing. Would there be ANY issues mixing these?

4 thoughts on - Software RAID1 Drives

  • using Linux MDRAID ? they’ll probably be fine. they are all 7200rpm drives so should have quite similar performance. main difference is the MTBE spec

  • John R Pierce wrote:

    It’s “enterprise” grade, where the two reds are “NAS-ready”. In either case, the TLER should be 7 sec, so it should work. The ones to watch out for are the desktop grade, like the green (bleah!!!), which have a TLER of something like 2 MINUTES. That will *not* work in a server….

    mark “why, yes, we did try them”

  • You probably won’t have any issues from doing this so long as spin speed, cache size and storage size match. Although if using a RAID card they can sometimes be a bit more picky about the replacement drive you give them.

    We had one of our mail servers hard drives kick the bucket after 3 years active service, originally it had two Toshiba DT01ACA200’s it now has 1x Toshiba DT01ACA200 and 1x HGST HUS724020ALA640 as we didn’t have any Toshiba’s around.

    Either way, the drive was added to the array, it rebuilt with mdraid and has been running fine with no problems for almost 3 months now.

    If using different drives were to cause issues, that would almost certainly have triggered it as it was a different manufacture and all.

    Naturally though make sure your drives match to a degree, aka, all are the same spin speed, have same buffer size, same storage size etc.

    But aside from that, you can almost stick any drive in and it’ll rebuild and work using mdraid.

    Kind Regards, Jake Shipton (JakeMS)
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