Mac Pro RAID 1: Correct Drives?

[seanf]

Hello,

I'm currently waiting for my Mac Pro to arrive and am thinking I will buy two 16MB cache drives to replace the one it comes with and set them up as RAID 1. This will leave me with the Mac Pro drive as spare, which I will use for Time Machine when Leopard comes out. Can someone please confirm that this drive is correct for the Mac Pro?

Thanks

Sean

 

[spicyapple]

Those will work.

Or you can get the Seagate 320GB HD with SATA-2 interface... these HDs use the new perpendicular recording technology.

 

[seanf]

Or you can get the Seagate 320GB HD with SATA-2 interface... these HDs use the new perpendicular recording technology.

Thank you for your reply. Have you got the model number for these drives? Is the model I linked to not SATA-2?

Sean

 

[spicyapple]

It is. SATA-300 is the same as SATA-2, but it's confusing.

I checked on the 320, it's a little less value than the 250.

 

[seanf]

... it's confusing

It is! Thank you again for you help

Sean

 

[topgunn]

You are going to use RAID 1 AND have a dedicated drive to backup onto? Do you mean RAID 0 by chance?

 

[seanf]

You are going to use RAID 1 AND have a dedicated drive to backup onto? Do you mean RAID 0 by chance?

I was thinking RAID 1 would protect against drive failure and provide a (probably quite small) speed increase. I'm open to suggestions though!

Sean

 

[godbout]

I think that you will find that with prices of HD's being SO cheap that it is best to use the RAID1 level over the RAID0 because you will lose no performance over RAID0 and you will have a much safer data environment. Maybe when Timemachine comes out you can think about changing this and regaining some disk space that is taken by the RAID1. Anyways, that is my suggestion.

 

[Chaszmyr]

Two things:

1. I don't believe that there is anyway to set up a hardware RAID controller inside a Mac Pro, so if you wanted to do this you'd probably want to do it with external drives.

2. Time Machine allows you to do a complete system restore, does this not eliminate the need for RAID 1?

 

[seanf]

1. I don't believe that there is anyway to set up a hardware RAID controller inside a Mac Pro, so if you wanted to do this you'd probably want to do it with external drives.

You can setup a software controlled RAID, which is supposed to perform just as well as many hardware controllers.

Sean

 

[godbout]

Two things:

1. I don't believe that there is anyway to set up a hardware RAID controller inside a Mac Pro, so if you wanted to do this you'd probably want to do it with external drives.

2. Time Machine allows you to do a complete system restore, does this not eliminate the need for RAID 1?

You can do a software RAID implementation, with 4 CPUs there will not be enough over head to matter. Infact i would not be surprized if the HDs are not already contributing to a bottleneck on a system like the MacPro. Also, it is going to be like 7 months before Timemachine is out for redundancy. So I still tend to think that even without having a hardware based RAID1 it is still the best way to go.

 

[godbout]

You can setup a software controlled RAID, which is supposed to perform just as well as many hardware controllers.

Sean

Hahaha beat me to it