RAID 1 Replacement of failed drive

[dphoneguy24]

I have a RAID 1 consisting of 2 120GB drives. Both are 7200rpm SATA-300 drives with 8MB cache. I know if I replace the one bad drive it has to be a minium of 120GB or can be a larger drive (of which will still be only 120GB in the RAID). What if the replacement drive has 16MB cache? Will this create a problem if the 2 drives have different cache ratings?

Thanks,
Dphoneguy24

 

[kjv1611]

I don't know if that will be the case with ALL RAID setups, but I can say from personal experience that this didn't work for me when I used on onboard Nvidia RAID driver once. I wanted so badly to do a RAID 1 for the system, but didn't want to buy another hard drive. One had a 2MB cache if I remember correctly, and the other an 8MB cache... or whatever the difference was.

Anyway, it absolutely refused to work. So, yeah, if you're wanting to rebuild that array, it'd be best if not necessary to make sure the hard drives are practically identical, or else extremely close - cache size, spindle rotation speed, storage size, etc.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[goombawaho]

Best bet would be to buy a similar drive enought to get the mirror going again. Then, if you wanted things to be identical, buy a 2nd new drive and "fail" the original drive and replace it with the other new one.