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I'm building a new server here at university and I suggested that we use two different SSDs in RAID 1 (mirror) to avoid both drives failing at the same time because of some inherent manufacturing error.

For example Intel's 120GB SSD and Kingston's 120GB SSD.

I had read somewhere it was a good idea to use two different drives in RAID 1. If one of them fails because of some inherent drive issue, then it's unlikely that the other one will fail at the same time.

Is my suggestion good or not?

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  • That doesn't sound unreasonable, but at the same time that's not something I've ever worried about or done, nor has anyone else that I know of.
    – joeqwerty
    Jan 27, 2015 at 1:00

2 Answers 2

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Probably not.

There's a bigger difference between SSD manufacturers than there is among makers of traditional hard drives, which results in different drivers and different optimal settings for different SSDs. A RAID 1 array with SSDs from different manufacturers would probably suffer from performance issues, and I'd expect it to have more stability/compatibility issues.

The rate of SSD failure is also significantly lower for SDDs than for traditional disks, so you might not need the extra expense of a RAID setup for resiliency. If you do decide to use a RAID 1 setup with your SSDs (I wouldn't) and are worried about a manufacturing defect, buy the same make and model, but get them from different production batches. This is most easily done by buying them from different vendors (or at different times, though that may be less practical).

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I think that this is a good idea because it is "as simple as possible".

The only drawback (that is not as important as reliability that you've described as top priority) I see is the final performance that would be almost equal to performance of the slower drive (in each particular situation there can be different one).

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