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Question on raid, time machine, the universe and everything.

L

Lotus11

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 18, 2006
16
0
Hi all. Im about to drop the hammer on a Mac Pro and have a question about setup for my drives. I am a graphic designer and photographer so speed, storage and backup are paramount. Here is what I'm thinking:

2 750GB drives Raid 0 for main volume
2 500BG drives Raid 0 for scratch disk

Heres my main question.

I want 2 separate externals for backup and daisy chain them. Will Time Machine backup to 2 daisy chained externals? For you PS geeks out there, does this sound like a good setup for the scratch disk?

I'd love to go SAS, but just cant afford it. Thx in advance. - Sean Paul.
 
I can't answer your questions about drives and raid set-ups, but the other answer you're looking for is 42.
 
lol! 42 is correct I just wish I knew where all the damn dolphins went. :D
 
Why do you need 1.5TB of space for your main boot drive? I'd just go with a 250GB drive for OS and apps and then have 2 or 3 1TB drives in RAID 0 for scratch and the have external drives to backup too.
 
Well thats just it, Im not a techie too much, so I don't really know the best way to set up my drives for optimal use. Any tips would be appreciated. Thx.
 
The only thing Raid 0 as a boot volume is going to do for you is speed up the machine. Tests done by MacWorld magazine showed that booting from a Raid 0 drive sped the mac up significantly. If this is appealing to you, then set up your boot as a Raid 0. If not, there's really no need to use anything other than the single, stock drive as a boot drive.

I work with a bunch of video, so personally, I'd mirror my scratch drive (Raid 1 instead of Raid 0) so that if one of my drives failed, I wouldn't have to re-render all of my video. If redundancy in your scratch drive isn't important (e.g., you're using them as a Photoshop scratch drive only), then a Raid 0 will give you a much faster scratch drive than no raid or a Raid 1 would.

I use time machine with an external FW800 drive just fine and it's completely happy.
 
Moof1904 said:
The only thing Raid 0 as a boot volume is going to do for you is speed up the machine. Tests done by MacWorld magazine showed that booting from a Raid 0 drive sped the mac up significantly. If this is appealing to you, then set up your boot as a Raid 0. If not, there's really no need to use anything other than the single, stock drive as a boot drive.

I work with a bunch of video, so personally, I'd mirror my scratch drive (Raid 1 instead of Raid 0) so that if one of my drives failed, I wouldn't have to re-render all of my video. If redundancy in your scratch drive isn't important (e.g., you're using them as a Photoshop scratch drive only), then a Raid 0 will give you a much faster scratch drive than no raid or a Raid 1 would.

I use time machine with an external FW800 drive just fine and it's completely happy.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your post... I was going to go with a RAID 0, but I think after reading your post, I'm going to instead go with the RAID 1. I use Final Cut Pro and wouldn't want to re-render everything if a drive failed (and I have great backups - MiniDV).

So tell me... do you use a HW RAID or SW?
 
Thx Moof. That's kinda what I figured. I want it to be as snappy as possible, so Raid 0 on my boot seemed right to me. Dont care about raid 1 on the scratch, since there wont be anything on it. Like I said, Im techno-challenged so I appreciate the help!
 
would a partitioned RAID-0 for OS/data work better?

I currently have a dual 750 in a RAID 0 running a standard OS setup. I am about to redo everything for a new MacPro and am thinking of separating the OS and the user directories onto separate logical disks.

Would there be any advantage to use two 1TB disks in a RAID-0 and partition that into a 500GB and 1500GB partitions for the OS on one and DATA on the other? Or would it be better to have a single 500GB drive for the OS and the dual 750GB in RAID-0 for user directory and data?

I don't know if the faster raid-0 transfer would outperform having a separate data path to a non-raid OS disk. It would free up one drive bay as well.

I was also thinking of adding a third drive for Boot Camp and Windows, but partitioning that into two logical drives. One would be NTFS and the Windows boot drive. The other would be HFS and assigned as a "scratch disk" for programs. This would allow the otherwise dormant drive to be useful full time since it takes up a valuable disk bay in the box.

I would really appreciate any comments on these configurations...

Thanks,
Howard

ps. I am also going to have a firewire 800 RAID-1 drive system for Time Machine backup.
 
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