My brother has an E510 Dimension with an OCZ 500 watt power supply and Nvidia 7900GT video card. He currently has the original 80gb Seagate hard drive as the main drive with no backup. The 80gb has been a little feisty lately, so he wants it replaced before it toasts itself and he loses his files.

 

The question we have is this:

 

I have 2 SATA drives on my "parts bin" shelf and he'd like them installed instead of the little 80GB drive. One is a Western Digital 320gb SATA which he'd like for his main drive, and he also wants my Seagate 500gb SATA drive as a backup. I generally only will keep same brand drives in the same PC, but he's a "poor" college student and doesn't want to have to buy another drive.

 

Has anyone here experienced any problems mixing 2 different brand SATA hard drives in the same PC?

 

Years ago, I had a Seagate (main) and a Western Digital (slave) IDE drives in my old Dell 4600 and for some reason, the read/write speeds between the 2 were very slow. I finally switched out the WD for a Seagate in that PC, and both the Seagates reading and writing sped up considerably.