Can I use two different drives?

My Password Is 1234@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 46 points –

I am building a NAS in RAID 1 (Mirror) mode. Should I buy 2 of the same drive from the same manufacturer? or does it not matter so much?

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To the best of my knowledge, this "drives from the same batch fail at around the same time" folk wisdom has never been demonstrated in statistical studies. But, I mean, mixing drive models is certainly not going to do any harm.

mixing drive models is certainly not going to do any harm

It may, performance-wise, but usually not enough to matter for a small self-hosting servers.

I wouldn't mix 5400 rpm drives with 7200 rpm drives, but if the rpm & sizes are the same, there won't be any measurable performance loss.

If everything went fine during production you're probably right. But there have definitely been batches of hard disks with production flaws which caused all drives from that batch to fail in a similar way.

I know it's only what I've experienced but I've been on a 2 weeks of hell from emc drives failing at the same time because dell didn't change up serials. Had 20 raid drives all start failing within a few days of each other and all were consecutive serials.