Hard drives and Raid questions

[SimD]

Hey everybody,

Alright, so I'm in the market for an external hard drive to sit beside my wonderful MBP. Now I use the MBP mostly for photo editing (more than amateur photography but not professional either) and heavy music production/recording. I've been doing my research and I understand that when it comes to video/photo editing, a RAID 0 setup is the most efficient as it allows for the fastest data retrieval. Of course, there's the whole issue of losing 1 disk = loss of all disks...

Well my first question is exactly that. What are the chances of losing a disk? I mean when reading about it, it almost sounds like it happens often...

Also, exactly HOW fast is RAID 0? Is it worth the extra coin to deck out and get 2 drives? Or is that one drive via FW800 good enough? I understand this is more of an opinionated question, but you guys have a lot more experience, and it'd help to know what you all think.

Finally, my last question is about partitions. Say I purchased a dual drive 1TB My Book (just an example). Would it be possible to set it up so that only 500GB is in RAID 0 and that the rest of it is set up as a Time Machine partition?

Thanks a lot for all of your time!

Sim

 

[Hawkeye411]

I have a Mac Pro at work and I have 2 HD's and a software RAID. I also have 2 external HD's; 1 backing up with Time Machine and the other backs up documents (overkill perhaps). But I have been burned 2 times in the past with HD failures. I'm guessing it would be more difficult to do an external RAID. You could do two different types of external backups like I am doing (Clone and Time Machine).

Cheers.

 

[SimD]

Hmm thanks. See this is what worries me, the loss of a disk.. See I don't have too much $$ to put into this, and I'd like to keep it reasonably cheap.

I'm considering for the moment, maybe to pick a dual drive external and use it under a FW800 setup.. and when I have more money to spend, to perhaps pick another external for back up purposes and set up the dual drive under a RAID 0 setup.

More feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Sim

 

[hexonxonx]

Check out the LaCie 2 Big Triple drive. It has three modes of raid protection built in and two 500GB disks. You can set it so it makes an exact backup on each disk, one single backup using the total space of 1TB or forget all that and simply use Time Machine. I bought one last week but am just using it as storage for my movies and music from iTunes. I simply have everything copied to two different drives so if one goes bad, I still have a copy of everything on the other.

Disks can go bad after a day of usage, a week, several years. It's just a gamble that we are all taking. I once had a WD drive go bad after using it a week and then packing it up and setting it in the closet for a year. It was dead upon reinstalling it in the computer. I also had a WD 350GB drive go bad after two years of being left on 24/7. It picked the worst time to die: I had just transfered things over from my MBP so I could do a fresh install of Leopard. As soon as I started the install, the external drive started up with the click of death and I lost allot of music and movies. It died two years from when I bought it. Backup backup backup!

 

[SimD]

I think my big problem now is that if I really want that RAID 0 setup, I'll need another setup dedicated to back up for the 1TB (so say 1.5-2TB back up)...

I figure I could always pick up a dual drive and use it under FW800 for the time being until I can afford the back up..

Dilemmas...