RAID Questions

[patseguin]

I love my WD Raptor drive but it is filling up fast. I have my original 160GB drive still in there for backups, etc. If I were to remove the 74GB drive and buy another 160GB drive, could I do a two-drive array for performance? Does OS X support RAID in software or would I need a controller?

 

[uaaerospace]

Sure, OS X supports software RAID. Others may want to comment on actual speed improvements.

Check out this link for more information.

 

[Nikore]

I did it on my box (2 x 400gig drives) and there was no real speed increase, if anything its actually a littel bit slower for some things. Though I did find it more usefull to have one big disk insead of two smaller ones. Also I rember reading some where that only Tiger supports booting off raid drives, might be something to look in too.

OH! and you might want to get another (external in my case) drive for back ups, if one of the drives in a raid0 goes bad the entire FS is bad and you normally can't recover anything.

 

[plinkoman]

if your going to raid, make it a hardware raid, not software, you'll notice much more performence out of it, and so long as there are the right drivers for the raid controller, os compatability doesn't matter, it will just read as 1 big drive

oh, and if you'll notice in my sig, my pc has one of these, so i can personally attest to how fast they are; it blew me away when i first installed it

 

[patseguin]

According to the article I read, you need at least 3 drives to do a RAID. IS that true? I had hoped to maybe get 2 300GB (for instance) drives and mirror them. You cannot store more than 2 internal drives in a G5 anyways can you?

 

[pgre]

According to the article I read, you need at least 3 drives to do a RAID. IS that true? I had hoped to maybe get 2 300GB (for instance) drives and mirror them. You cannot store more than 2 internal drives in a G5 anyways can you?

This is not True if your wanting to use Raid 0 or 1, i.e. stripping or mirroring.. but it is true if your looking at other levels of Raid. e.g. Raid 5.

You can get some external kits to add more drives to a G5 but only the olders apparently but not the new dual core systems.

You could always get an SATA PCI card and use external SATA disks if you want a SATA solution.