SATA firewire and raid

[cmx08]

will SATA HD have external enclousure in FW400?
will it work on Raid 1 if there was on my ibook?

will raid 1 support in ibook w firewire 400?

 

[tomf87]

Your questions really aren't complete, so I'm going to take a guess.

I do not know if there are any FW400 enclosures that use SATA drives. Considering FW400's theoretical maximum throughput of 50MB/sec, using SATA drives would not increase performance over standard ATA drives.

Any external enclosure would not do RAID between an internal drive of any machine (iBook, PowerBook, PowerMac, or XServe) and the external drives in the enclosure. Any external enclosure that performs RAID would do so between the drives inside the external enclosure.

 

[cmx08]

ic

I was hoping that SATA will replace PATA by now for external cases.

I had sold almost all my PATA 133 HDs since I'm going to upgrade them for SATA 150 HDs.

however, at this moment, i have a 250GB HD with lot of data and I use it to backup my iBook's info.

if there are no such thing as SATA external case, I will not get another 250GB in SATA tech to replace my PATA HD.

_______

RAID in external case

since i have a lot of data in my 250GB HD, i was thinking that maybe I should RAID 1 it so if the HD goes south, I'll still have a clone.

tomf87, do you mean that in order to use RAID in external case for ibook or powerbooks, I must buy a special case? not like 2 LaCie d2 Big disk?

if that's the case, do they make SATA RAID 1 cases?

LaCie's d2 Bigger disk 500gb uses something similar like Raid 0 to fuse the 2 HD together, right?

do you call it Strick? or is Strick when you connect 2 d2 bigger disk together.

I heard the Strick thing at LaCie's site in a clip introducing Bigger disk

 

[tomf87]

<snip>

RAID in external case

since i have a lot of data in my 250GB HD, i was thinking that maybe I should RAID 1 it so if the HD goes south, I'll still have a clone.

tomf87, do you mean that in order to use RAID in external case for ibook or powerbooks, I must buy a special case? not like 2 LaCie d2 Big disk?

if that's the case, do they make SATA RAID 1 cases?

LaCie's d2 Bigger disk 500gb uses something similar like Raid 0 to fuse the 2 HD together, right?

do you call it Strick? or is Strick when you connect 2 d2 bigger disk together.

I heard the Strick thing at LaCie's site in a clip introducing Bigger disk

I do not know of any external cases that support hardware RAID except for hardware that connects to a SAN (e.g. XServe RAID). You may be able to use OS X to create a software RAID 1 between two external drives, however I have not tried this and do not know if it will work. One solution may be to get two external drives and perform a backup to the second drive using utilities like SilverLining from LaCie. I believe you can download it for free from their website. The beauty of this product is that it only copies changed data every time it is ran.

The term I assume you are looking for is stripe. Striping without parity is RAID 0, which I assume is what the LaCie Bigger Disk uses. Striping with parity is RAID 5. Mirroring is RAID 1.

If I were you, I would not discount parallel ATA drives just yet, as there are still a great number of systems that have parallel ATA in the real world. In addition, until Serial ATA can extend beyond its theoretical 150MB/sec throughput rate, I do not think the drives are worth any extra money they may be charging. If you can get a serial drive cheaper go for it, but it is not worth spending more money on just yet.

 

[Hoef]

Newbie question here .... Can you always plug in a HD and do RAID (on the fly) or do you have to setup your system with RAID from the beginning, clean install etc...? Tx

 

[cb911]

yep, i think you've got to set-up RAID when you format your HD.

i thought that you could just daisy-chain a heap of FW external HD's and then set them up as RAID?

you might be able to find a SATA enclosure, but i'm not sure about that. but if you can find one, then yes i think you should be able to get it to work.

but you only want to include the external HD's in the RAID, not the iBook's internal drive, right? i dont' think that would work...