I want to build a new server or at the very least get some new drives. I would like to have at least 1TB drives and use RAID 1. However, in the past with just 500GB drives I had some problems getting them to sync. I sent the problematic drive back to WD and they mentioned that it wasn't designed for RAID use and because of it's size it may have difficulty syncing.

I have looked at both the enterprise drives ($$$) and regular drives ($$). I only can really afford the regular drives right now, but I could wait.

My question: Will regular drives work ok? I mean it is Redundant Array of INEXPENSIVE Disks, right?

What advice can you offer?

Thank you!

Software raid works well with nearly all available disks. Syncronization requires longer on larger disks, but that's all. I use 2x2TB samsung spin point eco f4 disks in a software raid1 without any problem.

Standard consumer disks will be used in nearly any low budget NAS device, so i see no retriction from hardware site.

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One of my machines has 4 x 1TB in RAID10, another 2 x 500GB in RAID0, and yet another 1x (well, 5/8ths) 500GB and 1x 320GB in RAID1. All mdadm and they never give any trouble - the RAID10 one has even suffered (and coped with) drive failure. With the larger drives they will take a while to sync due to the sheer volume of data.

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