I've done the same strategy with spinning rust. Only a noob sets up a RAID mirror with two drives same model same mfgr and adjacent serial numbers. I say noob

I've done the same strategy with spinning rust. Only a noob sets up a RAID mirror with two drives same model same mfgr and adjacent serial numbers. I say noob because you only experience this failure mode once before you'll professionally refuse to deploy that way. I have had historical issues with corporate procurement of dell servers with this problem. There is a labor intensive strategy where you throw all the servers into one room and play switcheroo. They'll still be the same model and maybe even the same batch but at least they'll probably not be adjacent serial numbers anymore. A coworker of mine had the strategy of buying RAID servers and then pulling and replacing one drive from all the servers after initial burnin and keeping the yanked drive as as a cold onsite spare. I would gladly pay a little more money to dell or a competitor to put together turnkey servers with carefully intentionally mismatched raid.