I'm getting tired of changing how my iTunes library is managed every few months due to storage issues. I'm strongly considering creating a striped RAID with 2 500GB USB 2.0 HDs which will hopefully last me a year or two for my storage needs. I know the risk of striped: if one HD craps out, I'm screwed. I'm not paranoid about this since I backup regularly. I am planning on using Mac OS X's disk utility to do this. I would really appreciate input from other geeks concerning other risks/concerns I haven't considered or other methods of RAID creation. Also, if I do decide to stripe, will Leopard recognize the RAID or should I wait till the release of Leopard
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RAID or not?
- Thread starter Gassy-Geek
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Besides the increased risk of failure from RAID 0 there are not really any other drawbacks. However large file transfers can be quite a bit quicker as well as boot times and opening large programs. If you want increased data protection you can have RAID 10 so that you have both a mirrored and striped array though this would be considerably more expensive as you would need 4 500GB Hard Drives.
As for the interface using USB 2.0 will be a severe bottleneck. Firewire would be preferable as it can maintain a higher transfer rate than USB. If your Mac supports Firewire 800 1394b get enclosures that handle that as even regular firewire will be a bottleneck to a RAID array.
For regular Firewire this enclosure would work well and is fairly cheap.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817193021
Firewire 800 enclosures are rather more expensive. This enclosure holds two hard drives and is cheaper that buying two Firewire 800 enclosures. It can also be used with SATA and SATA II drives rather than IDE and supports RAID 0. If you want you can also connect via USB 2.0 and Firewire 400.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817716028
As for the interface using USB 2.0 will be a severe bottleneck. Firewire would be preferable as it can maintain a higher transfer rate than USB. If your Mac supports Firewire 800 1394b get enclosures that handle that as even regular firewire will be a bottleneck to a RAID array.
For regular Firewire this enclosure would work well and is fairly cheap.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817193021
Firewire 800 enclosures are rather more expensive. This enclosure holds two hard drives and is cheaper that buying two Firewire 800 enclosures. It can also be used with SATA and SATA II drives rather than IDE and supports RAID 0. If you want you can also connect via USB 2.0 and Firewire 400.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817716028
Leopard should support all OSX tree structures (and all the ones Tiger does, probably along with more), and the Tiger/Panther striped RAID array is built on a valid file structure. So, simply put, I wouldn't be worried about conflicts with Leopard.
As for need/benefit, if you don't care if you lose everything, then go for it. It seems a bit unnecessary, and there are other methods of combining drives into a single disc that might suit your needs better (though without the speed gains). But really, if your drives aren't so old that you're worried about failure, it will work fine; I've had a RAID0 that I haven't even rebuilt in about 6 month, still works fine...
As for need/benefit, if you don't care if you lose everything, then go for it. It seems a bit unnecessary, and there are other methods of combining drives into a single disc that might suit your needs better (though without the speed gains). But really, if your drives aren't so old that you're worried about failure, it will work fine; I've had a RAID0 that I haven't even rebuilt in about 6 month, still works fine...