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zanax

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 6, 2010
23
0
I am looking into all sorts of backup options. Thinking of getting a Lacie 2big 2TB RAID1 (effectively 1TB) firewire external HDD for backup needs. I am not concerned about speed as it is meant for archival purposes only.

Almost ordered one when I found another way to do it is daisy chaining 2 separate 1TB Lacie firewire HDD in RAID1 configuration using Mac disk utility. The advantage being 1> Lacie 2big 2TB HDDs are notorious for being noisy but the Lacie 1TB HDDs are fanless hence super quiet. 2> having two separate HDDs+enclosures gives me two independently failing systems for the non-HDD hardware; meaning for the 2big 2TB RAID1 disk if the power supply or the built-in RAID controller card fails then I will have to buy another similar setup to access my data.


My question is in the second senario of daisy chaining 2 X 1TB HDDs in RAID1; If one drive goes kaput will I be still able to mount the healthy drive and retrive my data simply by connecting it to the mac thru firewire? Or, do I need to mirror my data back to a new 1TB before getting access to my data?

Obviously I haven't had the chance to use any RAID setup before, so comments are welcome, or if anyone is using such a setup what could be the other drawbacks that I am not thinking of.
 
You will be able to access your 'good' drive directly, without having to build another array.
 
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