From: "Antti Kurenniemi" 

"Frank Haber"  wrote in message
news:447c70bc$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> o Do you guys keep exact-same PATA spare drives on the shelf?

I don't - if one drive fails, I'd switch both of them asap.


> Could you actually use, say, a Seagate 250 as replacement for a failed
> Maxtor 250 and be happy?  How about a Seagate 400 - will it rebuild as a
> "250"  and run?

The software mirroring in W2k3 (at least - haven't tried other versions)
doesn't require the whole physical disk to be mirrored, you can create a
partition of any size and mirror that to another partition of equal size,
on another disk. At least that's how I understood it. So basically, any new
drive which is at least the same size as the original, should work.

I'd be uneasy with "cheap" hardware RAID systems, exactly for the
reasons you pointed out.


Antti Kurenniemi

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