Our educational institution is planning to buy a HP RAID server. For RAID 5 settings, it says that we should get 3 matching hard drives. Should they be of exact same size or should they just be of the same technology?
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Whats matters is that the RAID partition is the same size. So you will be limited by the smallest drive. You can put non-raid partition on the leftover space. It's best practice to make sure the drives are similar in performance; otherwise, the slowest drive will be the bottleneck. | |||
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Further to what fseto said, it's best practice (though not often followed) to get similar/identical drives from different manufacturers, or drives from the same manufacturer but from a different production batch (good luck with that!), so that a common defect in one model does not cause a multiple drive failure that kills the RAID array. Having said that, I have only ever seen this happen once - many years ago - when two drives in a 5-disk RAID array failed within the same hour when the drive bearings failed. | |||
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