I always thought you're supposed to buy similar drives so the performance is better for some reason (I guess the same logic as when picking RAM?) but this thread is changing my mind, I guess it doesn't matter after allđź‘€
that's also what we did in the early 2000s when building servers.
today i don't think it realy matters. i haven't had a failed drive for about 10 years and only needed to swap them out because of the capacity...
I actually thought about that quite a bit, back in the day hard drives were made of sugar-glass. Remember the desk-star? Hrm, the death star. Do anything? It breaks. Do nothing? 15% fail rate anyways (or so I remember).
Today I have a 3TB + 2TB (one backs up mostly the other) drives in my NAS (WD, black maybeee) and I think they are 10y plus ... I'm not using it as a real backup but I still think I should switch out one. But then again, the Synology is so old too...
I've heard about that newer Linux file system, "M" or "L" something where you just add drives and it sorts stuff out itself, maybe I should check that out...
ram matters because the CPU will use the worse speeds and worse timings of all the sticks, drive reads and rights are buffered so it doesn't really matter