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iaminsane

macrumors newbie
Original poster
So, please welcome me back. After 15 years (I had Mac Plus, LC and Quadra 650), I am back from the darkside. Bought myself a Mac Pro today. Yeah - I probably should have waited for nehalem, but my PC was getting flaky. Time for the every 9 month wipe/reload and I just didn't want to go through that again, so I jumped...

Tomorrow I am moving drives into the MP. My questions is specifically about partitioning and Raid. I typically partition my drives about 1/2 way down the middle and give the 1st partition to high performance needs and leave the second for infrequent use of backups and storage.

Lets assume I have two WD6400AAKS (I have three actually). Ideally, I'd like to partition them like this:
WD1 Partition 1A (200GB) Partition 1B (400GB)
WD2 Partition 2A (200GB) Partition 2B (400GB)

Then (using Soft Raid)
- Config partition 1A and 2A as Raid 0 Striped (giving me 400GB high performance)
- And config partition 1B and 2B as Raid 1 Mirrored (giving me 400GB redundant backup)

(Yes - of course i don't want to access the mirrored drives when expecting high performance from the striped drives)


I assume that once the drives are partitioned, the Soft Raid will simply see them as four different drives allowing me to configure them as described.

but before dropping a few hours into this, I thought I'd let all you raid/hard drive experts give your opinion.

So fire away.

peace
 
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