SATA Question

[FrankieF21]

Is it possible to link 2 different hard drives of different speeds like a 120GB 7200RPM Hard drive with a 36.7GB 10,000RPM hard drive. Woudl you still get the benifits of the 10,000RPM if it would work or do they need to be the same speed. If they need to be the same speed can they be different sizes. Thanks

[JohnE.]

Yes it's possible and yes you'll get the full speed of both drives. If you want to put the 2 different size/speed drives in a RAID array you'll lose capacity (and probably speed as well).

[FrankieF21]

ok thanks

[sechs]

You can't link harddrives together; only to the controller.

[FrankieF21]

well you can daisy chain them and thta is what i was refering to

[jmichna]

Originally posted by FrankieF21
well you can daisy chain them and thta is what i was refering to

Ah, ha! JBOD
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/...evels/jbod.htm

If you have some disks in a system that you decide not to configure into a RAID array, what do you do with them? Traditionally, they are left to act as independent drive volumes within the system, and that's how many people in fact use two, three or more drives in a PC. In some applications, however, it is desirable to be able to use all these disks as if they were one single volume. The proper term for this is spanning; the pseudo-cutesy term for it, clearly chosen to contrast against "redundant array of inexpensive disks", is Just A Bunch Of Disks or JBOD. How frightfully clever.

JBOD isn't really RAID at all, but I discuss it here since it is sort of a "third cousin" of RAID... JBOD can be thought of as the opposite of partitioning: while partitioning chops single drives up into smaller logical volumes, JBOD combines drives into larger logical volumes. It provides no fault tolerance, nor does it provide any improvements in performance compared to the independent use of its constituent drives. (In fact, it arguably hurts performance, by making it more difficult to use the underlying drives concurrently, or to optimize different drives for different uses.)

When you look at it, JBOD doesn't really have a lot to recommend it. It still requires a controller card or software driver, which means that almost any system that can do JBOD can also do RAID 0, and RAID 0 has significant performance advantages over JBOD. Neither provide fault tolerance, so that's a wash....

[sechs]

Originally posted by FrankieF21
well you can daisy chain them and thta is what i was refering to

Serial ATA doesn't support daisy chaining. All connections are point-to-point, controller to drive.

[FrankieF21]

yea i figured some things out my bad.