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Striping 2 drives in G5

MacTruck

MacTruck

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 27, 2005
1,241
0
One Endless Loop
I want to setup two 500gb seagate drives in my G5. I want to mirror them so they show up as one 500gb drive and the data is backed up to both drives at the same time.

My question is when these drives are mirrored and I have data on them, if one drive fails or I disconnect one drive will the other 500gb drive show up on my desktop as a standard drive with all data intact or will it be messed up because its mirrored?
 
To set it up, select the two drives in Disk Utility and choose Strip from the RAID Scheme menu. Name it, format it, and click Create. Of course, there's a better guide here which will probably highlight all my mistakes. Best to follow Apple's advice. :p

To the best of my knowledge, a disconnected drive will result in messed up data, sorry. There are obviously ways of discovering a failing hard drive and measures to take before it fails meaning that striped drives aren't completely dangerous though.
 
mad jew said:
To the best of my knowledge, a disconnected drive will result in messed up data, sorry. There are obviously ways of discovering a failing hard drive and measures to take before it fails meaning that striped drives aren't completely dangerous though.
Click to expand...


Thanks. That answered my question.
 
I could be wrong though. The link I posted mentioned recovering from failed drives when said drives are mirrored. Perhaps the OSX RAID software will give you a bit of warning about a failing drive too... It might just be wishful thinking though. :p
 
If the two drives are striped (RAID 0), then one HD failure will result in overall data loss.

If the drives are mirrored (RAID 1), then one HD failure is no problem (that's the idea of mirroring)!

The idea of RAID 1 is to half the chance of data loss. So, if you mirror the two drives, and one disk fails, then you have the time get another HD, put it into your G5, and let the software RAID rebuild it.

Idea of striping is to get higher data throughput, and to be able to create one large volume divided over more drives. So, faster but less safe.
 
Raid 0 is also very hard on drives. It's often known to accelerate the failing of a hard disk.
 
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