Using larger hard drive in an array? Problems?

Hello,

I realize that this might be a little off topic so if anyone has a better
suggestion on where to post this, please let me know.

I have a RAID 0 + 1 array and recently had one of the hard drives go bad. The
drive was under warranty and I had a spare already so I removed the drive,
rebuilt the array and sent the bad drive back for repair/replacement.

The drive is a Hitachi Deskstar 80GB SATA drive. I chose these drives because
at the time they had very good reviews on Pricegrabber, they had the fastest
seek times, a 3 year warranty and were very reasonably priced.

Once I sent the drive back, I started having problems with another drive in
the array (time out errors most likely due to bad sectors). These errors only
occurred in the logs during the middle of the night during the nightly
backups.

I waited for the new drive to arrive so that I could swap it with the other
drive that was going bad, however the drive arrived today and they sent me a
drive that is 160GB instead of 80GB like the rest of the drives part #
W13G0254 instead of part # W 13G0252. I contacted Hitachi and they said that
this drive is identical in all technical specifications except capacity. I'm
skeptical.

Do any of you think that putting this drive in the array and rebuilding it
will be in any way sub-optimal to having the exact same drive to replace it? I
don't really want to send it back and wait for the exact same drive as I
already have another drive in the array going bad that I'd like to swap out
instead.

Thanks,

John

 

If it really is identical besides the size, then it should work fine.

 

It should work fine, except your Mirror set will still be 80GB; you will
"lose" the extra space on the larger disk being added to the volume...

--
Ryan Sokolowski
MVP - Windows Server - Clustering
MCSE, CCNA, CCDA, BCFP
Avanade
http://www.Avanade.com

"A troubleshooter's best tool is the Event Viewer and understanding the
events and messages contained therein."

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.