Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Benjamindaines

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Am I the only one that wants to see a RAID / dual hard drive option in the MacBook Pro? So many PC manufactures are doing this. I think it would be great to order a MacBook Pro with 2x 200GB hard drives linked together for a total of 400GBs, or you could have them mirror each other. Does anybody else agree with me on this or is it just a silly idea?
 
I half like the idea, but I thought that a RAID was two backups copying each other... i.e. you have one user drive and 1 backup (with a copy of that too).
 
I half like the idea, but I thought that a RAID was two backups copying each other... i.e. you have one user drive and 1 backup (with a copy of that too).

Strictly speaking RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks... but it doesn't always have to be redundant

RAID 0 is striping, so the OS treats 2+ drives as one. This method does exhibit a slight performance increase
RAID 1 is mirroring, everything on drive 0 is duplicated in real time onto drive 1
RAID 10 is a combination of the first 2, so you have, say... 4 drives. You mirror them in pairs, and then run said pairs in striped.

RAID 5 is used for 3+ identical drives. You get (n-1) * capacity, where n is the number of drives in use. So if you have 3 500GB drives, you get 1TB of usable space. However, the advantage here is that an entire drive can fail, and the array is still usable. All your data is still there. However, you will want to replace that drive as quickly as you can. Once one drive fails, another failure is statistically not far away
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.