RAIDing for dummies

[pro2a]

I'm doing my first RAID this week with 2 SSD's and I have a few questions...

1. First off can you RAID any 2 drives? I'm RAIDing two SATA II SSD's with the same read/write speed, but different disc sizes and different manufactures. This one and this one.

2. If I can RAID any two drives, how exactly is it done? I have an idea of what to do, but I may need a little more detail on what all needs done.

3. My understanding is if I RAID these two drives I will basically have a 570 MB/s read speed and a 550MB/s write speed with a total of 150GB of space.

Thanks for all the help. My motherboard supports both RAID 0 and RAID 1

 

[MindoverMaster]

Hey Brandon!

Anyway, as long as the drives are SATA/PATA/SCSI, they should be able to RAID.

As this is on your board, you have to configure the RAID in BIOS. I take this is hardware RAID?

If you RAID 0 it, yes, you will have 150GB. That is cloning the drives as one.
If you RAID 1 it, you will have 60GB. The lowest dividend. Mirroring the drives as one.

 

[pro2a]

If I RAID 0 what happens to the other 90GB drive if I use all of the first 60GB drive? Is the extra 30GB unusable? My buddy just told me I can't do a RAID 0 with two different sized drives since it stores data on both. I think he means I can't do that with RAID 1. I can see that being an issue with RAID 1 since RAID 1 basically mirrors your data and you can't obviously mirror more then the smallest drive. I don't see that being an issue with RAID 0 since it doesn't mirror, it just splits the data.

Am I missing something here?

 

[MindoverMaster]

With RAID 0, you are putting at least two disks slapped together. so 90 + 60 = 150 space. You can put a 20, 40, 128 and 250 drive together with RAID 0.

 

[kmote]

Nope, 120GB in RAID 0. Smallest drive * array size.