Software RAID 0 in PPC G5

[cwright]

Hey all – quick question.

First of all, I've been using two 320gb SATA hard drives via a PCI SATA controller, as a RAID 0 640gb volume for years, and have been very happy with it so far. But... it's finally time to replace them with bigger drives.

So tomorrow I will be installing two 3TB drives in their place. My only concern is that at this point I don't know how much longer I will be using this particular computer. If I were to set these up and fill 6TB of data between them in a software RAID, will I run into complications if I were to move those drives to a new Mac Pro someday? Will the new Mac not be able to read any data since it wouldn't already be set up to recognize them as a RAID volume?

Just curious if I can get a definite answer, as this might persuade me to keep them as two separate drives.

Thanks!

 

[Nameci]

My two cents, just keep them as two separate drives. Much easier to handle.

 

[cwright]

I may end up doing that, but these will be used as my work drive and I generally like to keep it all on one volume. Not necessarily required though.

Related question – Is it possible that these will put too much drain on my Mac's power supply? A few months ago I replaced my dead graphics card with a FireGL X3 that needs 4-pin power. At the time I unplugged the two 320gb drives but now have the splitters needed to run all of them.

Is it too much to run the graphics card, optical drive, and two hard drives off the main power supply? At the moment I'm doing just that, but curious if that could cause problems in the long run.

Thanks

 

[burnout8488]

You didn't say which model you have, but the PowerMacs are known to have pretty beefy units. My liquid cooled one is 1000 watts, less for the air cooled models. If you can install it in the case, your computer can run it.

 

[666sheep]

Is it too much to run the graphics card, optical drive, and two hard drives off the main power supply? At the moment I'm doing just that, but curious if that could cause problems in the long run.

HDDs do not draw much W, so if it works now, it will work in the future. Good way to test it out is to set CPU on "Highest Performace" and run some graphics/CPU intenstive test. If power draw will be too much, your G5 will automatically shut down. I've had this once, when I put 450W PSU in G5 2.0 DP along with GF6800 Ultra (stock PSU was 600W). But with other graphics card (less power demanding) it worked fine.

 

[cwright]

Thanks for the replies. As for the model – it's a Dual 2.0 Ghz G5. Not liquid cooled or anything, so just whatever the stock power supply is.

I should be more clear though – I will actually have a total of four hard drives running in the computer. Two in the standard drive bays. Then the power cable that is run to the optical drive is split a few times to supply power to the optical drive, the graphics card, and two additional drives (the new 3TB drives) that are mounted between the fans and the front grate of the computer.

But as you said – if it's running all that OK now, it should be ok for the foreseeable future?

 

[OrangeSVTguy]

I don't see why it would hurt. The G5s had really good PSUs with plenty of power. There are adapters out there that added more HDDs to the G5 and those pulled power so you should be fine.

I've moved software RAID'd HDDs from various G5s and they always worked. I don't know how that would work if you moved them both to a Mac Pro but I don't see why it wouldn't see it as one partition if you moved them both over.