RAID1 with differing firmware

[gumpty]

Hello chaps.

Right, well I've had a couple of Seagate 1TB hard drives in RAID1 for a while (the ones with the dodgy firmware :shadedshu) - anyway, a couple of months ago one of them bricked. So I RMA'd it and it was replaced with a retail version of the same drive (slightly different product code).

I didn't think about it and installed and re-built the RAID array with Intel Matrix Storage Manager. That was fine - for a whole 24 hours before the new one bricked. Bugger.

So now that has been replaced I have had a closer look and seen that the drives have different firmware.

Is it a problem to have a RAID1 array with different firmware on each drive?

I will be updating the firmware on the old one before I set it up again, but they will still have slightly different firmware codes.

Seagate have been no help themselves.

Cheers!

 

[newtekie1]

You shouldn't have a problem.

I had similar issues, I bought 3 1.5TB drives and they all had the bad firmware. The first one bricked, and I RMA'd it, but in the mean time Seagate provided me with the proper firmware for the other drives. So now I have one drive that has a completely different firmware, and two with identical firmware, the RAID controller doesn't care.

The days of RAID controllers requiring identical drives is long gone. Most modern controllers will work with completely different drives actually, even different sized drives from different manufacturers. However, the array will be limitted by the slowest and the smallest drive.

 

[gumpty]

Cheers thanks for that newtekie.