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Hi I have a couple of windows systems that I wanted to install RAID 1 onto, I have purchased PCI express controller cards and extra drives, but here I made a mistake, one PC has an existing 3.5" 160Gb SATA drive, and by mistake I bought a 2.5" 160Gb SATA to pair with this disk.

Does anyone know if this will work? or will the different disk sizes cause an issue with the RAID any comments will be much appreciated.

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    They're both 160GB drives...why would the OS or controller care if they're 3.5 or 2.5 inch drives physically? If anything you should worry about the drive speed and formatting. Mar 15, 2012 at 10:57
  • I will format the drives the same, would different drive speeds cause an issue?
    – Kevin
    Mar 15, 2012 at 11:12
  • well, your performance could obviously suffer. Mar 15, 2012 at 12:19

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It will work normally. But it is preferred that your disks as similar as possible.

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RAID-1 will work, but you will only be able to make a RAID volume up to the size of the smallest drive (or probably slightly smaller).

In practice, it's generally worth making RAID volumes slightly smaller than the drive itself. I had one issue where I had to replace a Fujitsu MAU3147NP with a MAX3147NP and the MAX3147 was slightly too small to add to the RAID group. I had to back up and rebuild the entire array.

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