Mac Pro Ram (plus questions on raid-0)

[smitha96]

Friends,
I'm looking to upgrade my Mac Pro's ram. It's the standard 2.66ghz config with 1gb built in. I'm looking to add 1-2 more gb of ram, and then I don't have plans to upgrade beyond that any time soon (so there's no need to hold back on filling up ram slots). Might one of you suggest the best configuration and a reliable retailer?

On a seperate note, I am planning on setting up two 250gb internal hard drives in a raid-0 config with an external 500gb hard drive as back up. The data stored in the raid-0 config is important to me (family photos, movies, etc. that we would not want to lose), however I would still be regularly backing it up on an external drive. Is my data safe enough for me to sleep peacefully at night? What would happen if while backing up the drives onto the external drive there was a power outage? Could it damage the data on the internal and backup drives? Should I have a third backup? Would three 250gb interal drives in a raid 0 be asking for trouble? (with an external 750gb backup?)

Okay, as always, many thanks. Hope I've given enough information.

 

[THX1139]

Friends,
I'm looking to upgrade my Mac Pro's ram. It's the standard 2.66ghz config with 1gb built in. I'm looking to add 1-2 more gb of ram, and then I don't have plans to upgrade beyond that any time soon (so there's no need to hold back on filling up ram slots). Might one of you suggest the best configuration and a reliable retailer?

On a seperate note, I am planning on setting up two 250gb internal hard drives in a raid-0 config with an external 500gb hard drive as back up. The data stored in the raid-0 config is important to me (family photos, movies, etc. that we would not want to lose), however I would still be regularly backing it up on an external drive. Is my data safe enough for me to sleep peacefully at night? What would happen if while backing up the drives onto the external drive there was a power outage? Could it damage the data on the internal and backup drives? Should I have a third backup? Would three 250gb interal drives in a raid 0 be asking for trouble? (with an external 750gb backup?)

Okay, as always, many thanks. Hope I've given enough information.

If you have a decent battery backup, then you don't need to worry about power failure. That is, unless your battery runs out before your backup is complete! What I would do is have an extra backup set if your data is that important. Then whenever you do a backup, you replace the old set with the current backup. This way if you ever lose your current backup you will have a backup even though it may be slightly older.

If you have a MacPro, you really should have it plugged into a decent battery backup/surge protector. It will protect your computer from brownouts and other weird power anomalies.

You run the risk of losing data if you use the raid for storage. The common problem of losing data is if a drive goes bad or a directory gets corrupted. However you run the same risk on a single drive, it's just that having more drives increases the odds of losing data. You can offset those odds by having sufficent backups. What I do is burn all data collections to DVD/CD storage. Then I only have to worry about archiving new collections as they occur. This saves on hard drive space as well as the time it takes to do backups. I also don't worry about backing up data that hasn't been modified once it's stored properly.

 

[erikamsterdam]

If you are that afraid of data loss I'd say just get 2 500GB external disks and alternate them for backup. If whatever happens during backup, you always have last week's then.
A battery backup seems a very expensive solution to me.