@scottalanmiller said in Matching Drives for RAID:
*Under the Hood: RAID arrays effectively use all of their devices in lock step. Whether you have two drives or eighty in your array, all of them go and look for one block of data together and they all way for the slowest drive in the array to return its block before continuing on. When all drives are identical, they all read and write at the same time and we basically get full performance from every device.
A minor change to be more accurate
*Under the Hood: RAID arrays effectively use all of their devices in lock step. Whether you have two drives or eighty in your array, all of them go and look for one block of data together and they all wait for the slowest drive in the array to return its block before continuing on. When all drives are identical makes and models, the differences are much smaller between them and we get closer to full performance from every device.