Help w/ RAID Array

I am getting ready to set up a RAID Array but this is my first time doing anything with RAID. I know how to get into the BIOS and change settings and I know with two hard drives, I should do RAID 1. However, I just have a few questions before I do this. First off, I am an idiot and did not notice that my first hard drive I got when I built the computer has a 32 MB Cache:

Caviar Blue 1TB 7,200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive WD10EALX - OEM

I noticed it only had a 32 MB CACHE when I went to get another one. I then asked for the version with a 64 MB CACHE (WD1002FAEX), paid for it and left. Will these two hard drives work together in RAID if they have different sized caches? Please give me any info/experience you may have with this or anything with RAID would be helpful, thanks.

The short answer is yes, they'll work. Onboard cache is internal to the drive, and as long as the drives are the same size, then RAID 1 (mirror) should work fine. I don't think it would make much difference, but the drive with the larger cache should be the primary drive just for efficiency's sake.

jrstokes said:

I am getting ready to set up a RAID Array but this is my first time doing anything with RAID. I know how to get into the BIOS and change settings and I know with two hard drives, I should do RAID 1.

I may be misreading you, but just because you've got two hard drives doesn't really mean you should do any sort of RAID unless you've got a real reason to do so. It adds complexity that needs to be managed. I wouldn't consider it a valid data backup method either (just in case you may have been thinking that).

You add the risk of corruption because the drives won't be reading and writing at the same speed.

I can save you the time and say to not bother. There's no point in running RAID of any kind of asingle user desktop. You won't get any performance increase with a striped array, and as mentioned above, mirroring isn't a good backup method to secure your data.