ONE OF MY RAID DISKS SHOWING S.M.A.R.T ERROR IN BIOS AT BOOT .
sadly the other one died 2 months back but i managed to source a new samsung 2504c to replace it, can not now find a new 2nd replacement and wondered if a similarly speced other ( seagate, western digi etc smae capacity) hdd would run ok in the raid 0? or is this generally a bad idea.

i,m a severly peed off with the fat cat accountants run dennis publishing ex custompc refugee, and its great to see this site up and running. big respect to all involved!!

I have used different manufacturers but always the same capacity and had no problems.

i beleive you can pair any disks together in RAID, even regardless of size. but each disk will be limited to the size of the smallest drive

+1

RAID 0 is a stripe, therefore you need similar speed drives to get the full speed boost and avoid data corrupton from drives not syncing properly.
They don't need to be the same model but try to match the specs as well as you can.

I ran a raid 1 with two completely different disks for about a month (I was just looking for security of data, nothing to do with speed bosts, etc).
I used software RAID to mirror two disks, one Seagate 500GB 7500rpm 32mb cache SATA2, I mirrored that with a western digital 300GB 7500rpm 8mb cache SATA1.

II didn't notice much speed decrease, but then I had never used SATA2 prior to this...But it did work