RAID Question - Mixing Stripe/Mirror with Internal and External Drives

[NATO]

Question for those who know a bit about RAID on OS X as I'm really not sure myself and need advice.

Basically I want to create a striped RAID set consisting of 2 internal 500GB Drives to create one large 1TB Volume. Next, I want to to the same with 2 external drives to create another 1TB Volume. Finally I want to Mirror those two 1TB striped sets for reliability.

1. Is this possible using Disk Utility in OS X?

2. What happens when Leopard comes along and I re-format my boot disk drive, will Leopard continue to see the existing RAID set, or will it essentially break the RAID array?

 

[w8ing4intelmacs]

1. Is this possible using Disk Utility in OS X?

yes

2. What happens when Leopard comes along and I re-format my boot disk drive, will Leopard continue to see the existing RAID set, or will it essentially break the RAID array?

It's hard to speculate on an OS that isn't available yet, but it should "just work".

 

[NATO]

That's good to know, at least it's possible.

But to be more specific regarding the second question, say I build the RAID array as mentioned above - If I was to simply re-install OS X (which is on a completely seperate drive, nothing to do with the RAID array), when I reformat the boot volume, how will the newly installed version of OS X know that I have a RAID array configured? Or would I have to pull the data off the RAID Array to normal disks and set up the RAID array again before putting the data back onto it?

See what I'm getting at? It's hard to describe.. Its just that I don't want to lose all my data simply because I re-install OS X and it sees the 4 drives as seperate volumes, rather than one big RAID array...