hard drive model combination

[ShadQad]

hello every one,

i would like to ask a question about HP hard drives:

i have two hp proliant DL38 G6 server each with 8 hard bay installed and i planned to make them host most of primary services of the company mostly virtualized

each server will host four or more server roles on its own array for example:

hdd1+hdd2 RAID 1hosts active directory

hdd3+hdd4 RAID 1hosts DHCP

hdd5+hdd6 RAID 1 hosts Radius

hdd7+hdd8 RAID 1 hosts DNS

the exact same Array configuration is true for the second server

i have three diferent type of HP hard drives each with limited number of them , i just wanted to be sure are they compatible with each other please have a look at the attachment..

can i use two differnet model on the same raid for exaple what is the impact if i use number 1 with 2 or any other combination of them in one raid ?

many thanks

shad

[waaronb]

They should work okay. If you're mixing 3G and 6G SAS in an array it will fall back to the slower speed. Also, not all 146GB drives from different manufacturers have the exact same size, but if they come from HP then you can be sure they'll work with each other even if the physical drive underneath is Seagate, WD, Maxtor, or whatever else they've used through the years. I think the custom HP firmware they put on them limits them all to some compatible size or something like that.

Also, unless you have some specific system need dual port and single port can play nice together on a DL380 G6 since you're not running this in a dual controller setup.

If it were me, I might try matching up similar drives in the same RAID 1 arrays, but then again I might try to pair drives so I had one older and one newer in each array to minimize the risk of having 2 old drives in the same array die at the same time.