Cloning FW800 drives with CCC or SuperDuper

[OngL]

I have Western Digital Studio II (2x1TB, configured as 2TB). As I don't feel secure and wanted to make a backup of this HDD, I bought an identical HDD for backup.

Questions:
1) If I were to get a chance to start over, can I configure these two drives as a RAID cluster, so that whatever written on 1st disk, automatically mirrored to 2nd disk? Bear in mind, I'm using FW800 for both HDD in daisy-chained setup.

2) How reliable is RAID mirroring (software in leopard) using FW800 external drives, as it may subject to different 'connection/attachment' time to my iMac. Internal drives always on at the same time.

3) I tried to use CCC to clone the disk, the sustained speed is disappointingly at 30MB/sec read and write. If I did a copy from my internal HDD to external disk, I get easily 50-60 MB/sec.

Is there a better way of doing this? Copying between two FW80 without falling back to USB speed?

thanks

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

Software raid works, but is severely limited, both in speed and reliability. To get the REAL benefits of raid, you should consider getting a hardware Raid enclosure.

Also remember there are several levels of raid, some of which provide increased speed without reducing the possibility of data loss. The others provide much more safety, but at slighly slower speeds.....

 

[admwright]

Your WD drives support raid internally. They can be configured for mirroring and so does not need anything further from the computer or OS.

 

[OngL]

Your WD drives support raid internally. They can be configured for mirroring and so does not need anything further from the computer or OS.

I am aware of this, however, I do not trust mirroring. It protects against harddisk failure but most of the system crashes are due to file structure e.g. format, accidental deletion, file system corruption, etc. These issues are replicated blindly.

My setup now is that RAID spanning 2TB but mirror to another 2TB harddisk setup. Still using CCC to copy until now ... 8 hours to go.