Did I paint myself into a corner? (RAID question)

[mus0r]

Ok, so I decided to play around and make a raid set for my Mac Pro. I do audio and some video and a lot of games, so I figured the added performance boost would be nice.

My data was all over the drives I had (a partition/disk for every job), so I had to juggle data for most of an evening. First I moved my data off of 2 drives, which I striped and reinstalled OS X on. I used migration assistant to move my home folder and apps over. Some of those apps are crashing, BTW, but that's another rant.

So, after some juggling, I have my OS, apps and docs all on one striped set. Cool beans. What I wanted to do next was to create a second striped set and mirror them. I make set 2 and go to mirror the two and...it tells me I can't do it without erasing my data.

I don't have enough external storage to move my data off all 4 disks and start over. Am I fooked?

 

[Sean Dempsey]

Ok, so I decided to play around and make a raid set for my Mac Pro. I do audio and some video and a lot of games, so I figured the added performance boost would be nice.

My data was all over the drives I had (a partition/disk for every job), so I had to juggle data for most of an evening. First I moved my data off of 2 drives, which I striped and reinstalled OS X on. I used migration assistant to move my home folder and apps over. Some of those apps are crashing, BTW, but that's another rant.

So, after some juggling, I have my OS, apps and docs all on one striped set. Cool beans. What I wanted to do next was to create a second striped set and mirror them. I make set 2 and go to mirror the two and...it tells me I can't do it without erasing my data.

I don't have enough external storage to move my data off all 4 disks and start over. Am I fooked?

Yes, you can't create this type of setup without 4 blank disks. You're not screwed, but you just can't do it. Why would you though? While a Raid0+1 set might be cool, it's really not that necessary. Get chronosync and just do nightly backups to the 2 drives of all your data. You can use the striped pair to run your OS and things off daily, and then at night it will just backup your data.

Personally, having all my OS, apps and data on a single striped set would make me waaaaaay too nervous. You lose ANYTHING, you lose it all.