Yep, but a WD and a Seagate of the same vintage will generally be pretty
closely matched in performance, space, and firmware optimizations,
Nope. Not firmware optimizations. As far as performance that depends
on what aspect we're talking about as well as whether the two can play
nice.
and if
there is a difference in capacity between one bran of 250 GB drive and
another, it's not so huge a difference that one would consider it
"limiting" in any but the most pedantic sense.
According to your tolerances.
What's pedantic is to overanalyze a simple statement. I never
inferred an array, esp a software ATA array, would likely be crippled
with mismatched drives. Only that the "lowest common denominator" or
"weakest link", if you will, dictates how the array works.
While that is indeed a worst case, have you ever seen it actually happen?
Yes. Ranging from erroneous PFA failures to massive performance
degradation.
Most RAID today is software, not hardware,
on the low end.
and quite honestly Windows and
Linux and Novell don't _care_ whether a RAID is composed of different
brands and models
So? In most cases those OS's don't even know what's going on with the
storage on that kind of low level, as they shouldn't.
as long as the capacity and performance are about the
same.
nope. They won't care about that either. Esp in the case of firmware
or firmware assisted software raid. The end user might care though.
I believe that I said "exceedingly unlikely" myself. It can happen though.
Nope. you said "I don't consider such failure to be exceedingly
likely." Which since you like being pedantic you should realize it
does not convey exactly the same meaning as "exceedingly unlikely."
Where does one find an "expected service life" rating?
Directly from manufacturers as well as end-user decisions about life
cycle.
