External firewire raid?

[ShadowHunter]

Is it possible to create an external firewire 2 drive mirror (say with the Mac Mini, which has only 1 firewire port that I can bridge from one enclosure to the next)?

 

[patrick0brien]

Is it possible to create an external firewire 2 drive mirror (say with the Mac Mini, which has only 1 firewire port that I can bridge from one enclosure to the next)?

-ShadowHunter

Um, well yeah - kinda. If you have two identical physical volumes external, yes - set that in the Disk Utility. As for Mirrorin and internal drive with an external. To be honest - never thought of it, so I don't know.

 

[wooweebob]

Not only is it possible. I have been doing this for almost 3 years on my iMac G4. However there are the following restrictions.

• The volumes must be identicle in size
• You cannot mirror the internal hard drive

What I did was buy 2 of the exact same hard drive then used Disk Tools to create the RAID.
I also moved my home directory to the RAID but that is another tip.

 

[ShadowHunter]

Not only is it possible. I have been doing this for almost 3 years on my iMac G4. However there are the following restrictions.

• The volumes must be identicle in size
• You cannot mirror the internal hard drive

What I did was buy 2 of the exact same hard drive then used Disk Tools to create the RAID.
I also moved my home directory to the RAID but that is another tip.

Excellent, thank you both for your help.

 

[CanadaRAM]

RAID 0 will get you a single larger volume .The speed benefit of striping will be largely lost due to the bottleneck of both drives contending for the single FW400 buss. Barefeats.com shows significantly higher throughput when the drives are on separate Firewire controllers, such as a PCI card in a tower, or a PCMCIA firewire card in a Powerbook -- neither of which are options on a Mini.

RAID 1 (mirroring) is a good strategy for security, but RAID 0 for speed may have little or no practical advantage for speed, as the overhead of RAID processing, the bottlenecks of FW400 and of having the two drives on one controller, my outweigh the speed advantage for normal desktop use. Storagereview.com recommends RAID for multiuser servers and for huge-file use like video or audio capture only.