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Do you guys raid? RAID drive vs standard external drive?

PicnicTutorials

PicnicTutorials

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 29, 2013
546
13
After I bought my drive I started reading about raid. Raid 1 through 10 ya? Do you guys use a raid drive? Or standard non raid drive? I see in disk utility it gives the option to raid the drive. But from memory I only saw like raid 1 or 0 option I believe. Is it worth it? Advisable? Any info. Just like learning about my mac. No other reason beyond that to ask lol.

Currently I have my stuff on my internal drive. Backed up on My connected owc 3TB drive with time machine. And all backed up again on a un plugged older drive that I will occasionally drag over. Oh and backed up again on cloud storage cubby. So I am obviously covered here it seems. A program erased my whole drive 7 years ago. I had to take it to a recovery specialist. He recovered most everything but it was all badly scrambled. Every video frame (hundreds of thousands of them) were scrambled in with all my files. It was bad. So I am over protective now.
 
PicnicTutorials said:
After I bought my drive I started reading about raid. Raid 1 through 10 ya? Do you guys use a raid drive? Or standard non raid drive? I see in disk utility it gives the option to raid the drive. But from memory I only saw like raid 1 or 0 option I believe. Is it worth it? Advisable? Any info. Just like learning about my mac. No other reason beyond that to ask lol.

Currently I have my stuff on my internal drive. Backed up on My connected owc 3TB drive with time machine. And all backed up again on a un plugged older drive that I will occasionally drag over. Oh and backed up again on cloud storage cubby. So I am obviously covered here it seems. A program erased my whole drive 7 years ago. I had to take it to a recovery specialist. He recovered most everything but it was all badly scrambled. Every video frame (hundreds of thousands of them) were scrambled in with all my files. It was bad. So I am over protective now.
Click to expand...

Is this an internal drive or external?
 
PicnicTutorials said:
external
Click to expand...

Well RAID is great, I RAID 1 my 2 internal 1TB drives like you said above so you have 2 copies in case one dies, however make sure you know RAID is NOT a substitute for backup! as for external drives theres no point raiding an external single drive as you are just partitioning the same drive so if the drive dies so do both your partitions, does that make sense!?

Cheers
 
jakesaunders27 said:
Well RAID is great, I RAID 1 my 2 internal 1TB drives like you said above so you have 2 copies in case one dies, however make sure you know RAID is NOT a substitute for backup! as for external drives theres no point raiding an external single drive as you are just partitioning the same drive so if the drive dies so do both your partitions, does that make sense!?

Cheers
Click to expand...

I do understand thank you. :) So I would need two drives either in one enclosed or attached in order to use raid correctly.
 
PicnicTutorials said:
After I bought my drive I started reading about raid. Raid 1 through 10 ya? Do you guys use a raid drive? Or standard non raid drive? I see in disk utility it gives the option to raid the drive. But from memory I only saw like raid 1 or 0 option I believe. Is it worth it? Advisable? Any info. Just like learning about my mac. No other reason beyond that to ask lol.
Click to expand...

If you run into a situation where one drive can't keep up with your data demands, then RAIDing two or more drives will/may improve performance... or you could just go to an SSD.

Personally I still use an enclosure with two mirrored drives for one of my backups for the belt added to my suspenders. :) One of those things I started to do years ago. Starting fresh today I would probably just use the Mavericks feature that alternates backups among several drives.

For day to day working files, two drives in a mirror may lose less data and may result is less down time. So the decision is based more on your work flow, is it worth double the storage cost to avoid losing perhaps 60 minutes of recent work when a drive fails (or whatever time you set between snap shots). A no brainer in a more commercial multi user environment, but for your use thats a judgement call. Its rarely done except for those working hard on video or photo editing.
 
Personally, I think RAID is vastly over-rated for consumer use. Traditionally there are two reasons to use RAID
  1. You need a single volume larger than any of your drives
  2. You need more performance than a single spindle drive can produce
Item 1 is largely mitigated by drives becoming enormous. 4TB drives are almost free now... and creating RAID arrays larger than this result in expensive implementations with impossibly long rebuild times

Item 2 is being displaced by SSDs.

Some people (I think foolishly) believe they are getting significantly improved reliability by using RAID. While RAID can help protect against a single drive failure... they also create problems that do not exist with single spindle drives. In either case (RAID or not), backup is still required.

I would go one step further (pure speculation)... I would be willing to bet that more consumers have been bitten by RAID than saved by RAID.

/Jim
 
There are 3 major characteristics in systems performance:

availability
reliability
throughput

I use RAID 1 to address availability. That mode does zero for reliability (files not being corrupted) and may make a negative impact in throughput.

RAID 0 on the other hand is all about addressing throughput. IMHO it greatly increases the risk of poor availability (if one drive dies the whole volume is unavailable).

If you have need, money, and desk space to address all 3 performance characteristics you likely headed to something like RAID 5 or RAID 10.

And has been well said many times.....no RAID mode is a substitute for a proper backup plan.
 
I have no choice but to use a RAID. I need (well, want, technically) more than 4TB on a single volume, and since single drive mechanisms top out at 4TB, I have no choice but to combine multiple drives in to one volume via RAID.

And because RAIDs can fail, I'm extra careful with backups. Since the only effective way to back up a big RAID is on to another big RAID (which itself is of course more prone to failure), I back up to two separate units simultaneously.
 
My standard backup is a RAID 1 (mirror) of two 1.5TB drives. Same setup for the last five years.

For other data, I have an external NAS with RAID 5 connected to an UPS.
 
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