Question About RAID 0??

My laptop can do raid 0. i have two 320g harddrives at 7200rpm. my question is can i use two hard drives at different sizes and different speeds?

320GB 7200rpm
500GB 5400rpm

Will it work fine?

 

it will work but the 5400 will slow down the 7200, so you will get ok performance. also the 72 will be inoperative waiting for the other to catch-up.

 

so what should i do? should i run dual 320? or one 320 and the 500?

 

keep in mind also that you won't be able to use the 180GB difference. so you'll waste space and spinning time. If you don't care about not using that much space and you don't care about performance then just go ahead and do it.
keep in mind raid 0 and 1 are different. have you looked at raid 1 at all?

 

wait so i wouldnt be able to use 320 plus 500? forget that then because ill use the two 320 i have in it already then. raid 1 is not a option for me. im looking for storage. stripping is better then mirror in my eyes.

 

You sure about that? I was under the impression that RAID 0 doesn't reduce space to match the smallest drive, as in fact RAID 0 is simply spreading the data across disks; it doesn't add any level of redundancy such as RAID 1 - which would make sense for your comment.

You certainly can put them into RAID 0, and yes the speed will be impacted.

Basically, RAID 0 puts the two drives together and when it writes data it might write to one disk, it might write to the other, or it most likely will write different bits to each disk. RAID 0 essentially makes your computer think there is just the single drive.

I would actually recommend against it though. The only reason being that if one of your drives go, then you've lost everything pretty much. Even if you back everything up somewhere else, you then run the risk of trying to restore a backup to one disk (so you can continue using your laptop), but not being able to because the backup contains more data than can be restored on the smaller disk.

My recommendation would be to keep them as two separate drives, use your faster drive for files you access often and the slower drive for things such as movies, music, etc. Backup both disks on a regular basis.

Regards

 

Using raid0, the size of bigger drive will shrink to match the smaller one - simple as that.
+ the performance would also drop and you will get the same speed as having two 5400rpm drives in raid0.
I think, you can see, that there are 0 advantages in buying a 500GB 5400rmp drive if you want to have a raid0 setup.

 

In my experience I have found that when people talk about RAID 0, they forget about it's predecessor, Spanning. I did not feel the need to explain this to the thread originator as in reality my advice was to avoid anyway.

Just for the record though:
RAID 0 will limit your largest disk to the size of the smallest.
No this is not the only option. Look into spanning if you like - depending on what your OS is; there may be software out there to help in windows that is free; google away if you are interested.

My opinion on the matter is not changed - it's better to keep them as two separate drives.

 

The ability for a volume to span multiple disks has been a part of Windows since windows 2k. Go under computer management under admin tools.

 

how does JBOD play in all this?

 

Thanks .