Alexander Georgiev wrote:
I have used raid aware and non-raid aware disks for both hardware and software raid. You really want the raid edition drives, as they will send a fail up the channel much faster than a non-raid drive. The non-raid drives will retry over and over, and you stand a chance of data loss while they decide what to do. Software raid will just fail the drive and switch to degraded mode.
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Ok, and should I mix disks from different vendors? I have read somewhere that this augments the reliability of the array, lowering the probability of 2 disks and more go down simultaneously?
Not necessarily from different vendors as much as from different build lots, etc.
The theory is ... items build from the same components at the same time and the same place should fail/EOL at about the same time (all things being equal).
In practice, I have not seen that. If you are concerned about it, getting drives from different factories or lots (but the same manufacturer) should be OK.