Raid 1 array

[plasma dragon00]

Well this morning my 1tb drive seemed to have failed. i got home and was, surprisingly, able to access it again (so im backing everything up off of it now) im thinking, once i get this replaced, of buying another drive and setting them up as RAID 1. do raid 1 drives have to be the exact same model, or just the same capacity? i currently have a St31000340AS which i cant find in stores, only online. would adding a ST310005N1A1AS-RK still allow me to set up a raid 1 array?

thanks for the help


edit - also, how would setting up a raid 5 array work? once again, would i need 3 of the same drives? if not, would having two 1tb drives (not exact same model) and a 200 gig drive work? if so, how? i know it limits the capacity by the size of one disk. which disk would it the extra capacity be removed (like would it end up being a 1tb + 1tb or a 1tb +200g?) also, for each way, do i need any special cables or hardware for each one? my mobo is the Asus A8N-E which i looked up on and it says it supports raid 0/1, but im not sure how support for raid 5 works, if mine even supports it. how would i check or know?

sorry, im new to raid arrays lol. basically, anything a newbie to raid arrays should know, help me out XD (i am very computer literate though, fyi)

 

[xehqter]

Well this morning my 1tb drive seemed to have failed. i got home and was, surprisingly, able to access it again (so im backing everything up off of it now) im thinking, once i get this replaced, of buying another drive and setting them up as RAID 1. do raid 1 drives have to be the exact same model, or just the same capacity? i currently have a St31000340AS which i cant find in stores, only online. would adding a ST310005N1A1AS-RK still allow me to set up a raid 1 array?

Most cards that support RAID1 will allow you to use two hard drives that are not identical. The smaller of the two capacities will be the size of your RAID1.
ie: Drive 1 = 998GB and Drive 2 is 1TB, the RAID1 size will be 998GB

edit - also, how would setting up a raid 5 array work? once again, would i need 3 of the same drives? if not, would having two 1tb drives (not exact same model) and a 200 gig drive work? if so, how? i know it limits the capacity by the size of one disk. which disk would it the extra capacity be removed (like would it end up being a 1tb + 1tb or a 1tb +200g?) also, for each way, do i need any special cables or hardware for each one? my mobo is the Asus A8N-E which i looked up on and it says it supports raid 0/1, but im not sure how support for raid 5 works, if mine even supports it. how would i check or know?

sorry, im new to raid arrays lol. basically, anything a newbie to raid arrays should know, help me out XD (i am very computer literate though, fyi)

You need three drives of the same size otherwise the size of the smaller drive is used as the final size for all drives. RAID5 gives you faster reads but slower writes.

ie: two 1TB + one 200G would be the same as having three 200GB hard drives

If your motherboard doesn't support RAID5 you can't use RAID5

 

[plasma dragon00]

so if im not looking to spend the 200 dollars that i cant really afford to spend (im 17 without a job... gotta get one lol) 100 dollars for another 1tb in raid 1 should be the way to go?

and, how is the performance of raid 1? i dont do much other than game on my pc, and my pc is a tad outdated (older mobo as you can see, 1g ddr1 ram, 2.1ghz 1 core amd processor...) although i have a 8800gt vid card. every little bit counts here, although i guess for the sake of making all my data safe from physical failure, i could suffer from a slight drop in performance.