Looking around there is conflciting information on this, with some strongly suggesting one or the other.

From my understanding the issue with matched drives is that the wear on both drives is more or less the same, so the potential for the second drive failing with or very soon after the first is pretty high.

People also claim matched drives give substianatally higher performance however assuming the unmatched drives are more or less the same (eg 2, 1 TB STATA II 7200rpm drives with 32MB cache), would the minor differences between say a Seagate and a Western Digital one (say one has a 128MB/s read rate, and the other a 150MB/s read rate, as well as I guess various other minor differences) actually cause any notable performance loss, ie potentialy worse than two matched 128MB/s drives, or does RAID not really care and give you essentially an optimal solution (eg upto 278MB/s total read speed for RAID 0 and 1) and similar for other RAID with more "unmatched" drives (5 and 1+0 come to mind as possibilities)?

Also I couldnt find much info on how this is different on different RAID setups, eg RAID 0 or RAID 1, software or hardware RAID, etc. I'm assuming such things have an effect, and thats it's not all the same for RAID in general?