OEM Hard Drive and RAID setup

[quesofrito]

hello,

i just got my new mac pro a week ago. am planning on buying 2 500gb drives to store data.

2 questions:

1) should i just buy the OEM versions? will i need a cable or anything that is included in the retail box?

2) do i need to get any special hardware or software for a RAID setup? i didn't get the RAID option when i ordered my computer. i just want a redundant copy of all my data on both drives. maybe i just need to manually backup the primary drive to the second drive?

thanks.

 

[CanadaRAM]

1) Yes
1a) No

2) No
2a) RAID is not backup. if you delete a file accidentally, or overwrite a file, or crash and damage somthing, your RAID1 Mirror is immediately and equally as b0rked as your primary.

I vote for a periodic backup scheduled with something like SuperDuper, which you can have back up every night if you like.

 

[quesofrito]

thanks! so would there be any benefit to having a RAID setup for me? i'm not terribly concerned about the extra 5-10 seconds of speed i may gain.

 

[tyr2]

The benefit of a mirrored RAID (RAID 1) is that you can continue running if a disk fails, this can be important if downtime is going to cause a significant problem.

As stated however it doesn't provide a backup, so you also need to back up your data to another volume.

If you can cope with the time taken to do a restore from your backup, then you should probably use your second drive as a backup rather than a RAID 1.