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Can you RAID different size hard drives?

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Can you RAID different size hard drives?

It can be done, however the raid size is restricted to the smallest drive in the array. It’s generally frowned upon to use different drive types, let alone sizes for RAID, but it can be done if you don’t mind sacrificing the extra space on your larger drive to do it.

Do all drives need to be the same size for RAID?

Must hard drives in a RAID array be identical? No. It is perfectly valid to use hard drives from different manufacturers, model numbers, sizes, and rotational speed (spindle speed or RPM).

Can you do RAID 5 with different size drives?

Yes, in a RAID5 array the smallest physical volume (disk or partition) will define the size of the array, so any extra space on larger volumes in the array is not used. You should not see any issues with drives of different speeds other than the fact the the slower drive(s) will reduce average performance.

Can RAID 10 have different size drives?

Size limitations: There are four drives in my RAID 10 set with data striped across two mirrored pairs. As RAID 10 uses only half the capacity of the entire RAID 10 set anyway, the usable capacity in this situation would be 600 GB from a raw capacity of 1,650 GB.

Can you RAID 2 different hard drives?

You should never use two (or more) drives configured in a RAID 1 array to create a machine’s only backup for the following reasons: As you can see, using RAID 1 to “mirror” two hard drives doesn’t create a reliable backup at all.

Can you RAID 2 different speed hard drives?

You can do it, although the slower drive would be the speed limit of the array, but you also may run into stability issues. In other words, possible but not to be recommended.

Can you raid 2 different hard drives?

Can you RAID 5 with 2 drives?

You can indeed run a RAID 5 with only two drives but it’s degraded and a single bit failure on either drive will bring down that RAID. Dell calls this a RAID Puncture and the only recovery is to restore from backup.

Can you use different size hard drives in a server?

You can always mix drive sizes in RAID. And in plain RAID you always get the smallest common size from all drives. So in your case, each drive use 4TB. If you added one 1TB drive, all the drives would act as 1TB drives.

Can you add a hard drive to a raid?

Then, follow the steps below to add an extra drive to extend RAID 5 on Windows Servers: Install the new drive to your server computer via the connection cables. The new disk must have the same capacity as other disks. Start the PC and enter Disk Management after installing the new drive. Right-click the new disk and select “Online”, then initialize the disk as the same partition style as the old RAID drives.

Do all drives have to be in a RAID array?

A RAID array appears to the operating system to be a single logical drive, regardless of how many individual drives are part of the RAID array. Both hard disks and SSDs can be used , and while it’s advised that matching drives are used in a single array for best performance, it’s not strictly required.

What is the minimum number of drives for RAID 5?

RAID 5 groups have a minimum of three hard disk drives (HDDs) and no maximum. Because the parity data is spread across all drives, RAID 5 is considered one of the most secure RAID configurations.

What RAID level is disk striping with parity?

RAID 0 – striping

  • RAID 1 – mirroring
  • RAID 5 – striping with parity
  • RAID 6 – striping with double parity
  • RAID 10 – combining mirroring and striping