Time Machine vs Mirrored Raid?

[brendon2020]

my setup is 3 drives, one for time machine and then the os mirror'd across two drives. I use the software raid that came with leopard and haven't had any issues or noticed any slowdowns.
The raid software is very limited but once its setup never had any issues with it.

 

[UltraNEO*]

I guess so - yes. But as I never dealed with this topic, it is hard for me to decide, which one is best, good or favourable by reading a lot of arguments and data, that doesn´t say much to me. Sorry for that.

Could you PLEASE give an advice, which one might be a good choice to go for in a Mac Pro for a reasonable price?!
I will see, if it is available in Germany. THX

If needed, there's a company here in the UK that will rent/lease you a RAID system, it might be a good way to try the various cards. But that's might not be the most economical solution. Really depends on your work load, requirements and budget... it can become fairly costly if you go down the hardware RAID route but your data will be safer!!

Initially I looked into the RocketRAID but finding a supplier with stock proved to be impossible at the time. Eventually I settled for the CalDigit RAID card cause it's relatively fast, cost effective, expandable (have to use their own external boxes) and most importantly, does what it says in the box!!!

Now I think various people on here would say the card originally had teething issues and they would be right. However, for the duration that I've been using the hardware, I've not encountered any hardware glitches yet, except one failed drive


My MP have the following RAID5 configs, primary used for editing and processing HD Video content, AfterFX and some graphics for print. Typical streams varies from 500MB to 8Gb or more!

　Optical slot 1 - Panasonic 8x Blu-ray Burner
　Optical slot 2 - System - WD VelociRaptor 300Gb - WD3000HLFS

RAID5 Scratch disk (totalling 2.79TB, redundancy of 1)
　HD 1 (slice 1) - WD RE3 1TB - WD1002FBYS
　HD 2 (slice 2) - WD RE3 1TB - WD1002FBYS
　HD 3 (slice 3) - WD RE3 1TB - WD1002FBYS
　HD 4 (slice 4) - WD RE3 1TB - WD1002FBYS

The MP still has the onboard iPASS SATA interface available for further expansion but those drive wil have to be housed and powered externally.

If you wanna go with hardware and need some professional advice. Then there's a user on those forums called "nanofrog".
I'd recommend chatting to him about choosing cards but we basically agree on the above setup, when it comes to drives (except the BD-RE)

 

[sushi]

I clone my internal HD (500GB) to alternate external HDs every week via FW800.

I also am using Carbonite and ADrive for offsite or cloud storage/backup.

The problem with only local backup is that you could loose your computer and backup at the same time due to an earthquake, fire, flood, theft, etc. Suggest considering offsite/cloud storage additionally to your local mirror/RAID/external hard drive back up.

 

[UltraNEO*]

I clone my internal HD (500GB) to alternate external HDs every week via FW800.

I also am using Carbonite and ADrive for offsite or cloud storage/backup.

The problem with only local backup is that you could loose your computer and backup at the same time due to an earthquake, fire, flood, theft, etc. Suggest considering offsite/cloud storage additionally to your local mirror/RAID/external hard drive back up.

Yes.. Always backup valuable data, never chance it.
Though at worst, there's always data recovery centres, unfortunately it could be costly for the domestic user.

 

[Tesselator]

Of course it's possible. Software RAID is fantastic. I have the first 15GB of each of the four disks on my Mac Pro in a striped array for Photoshop scratch. I had a similar setup on my G5 for years. Works very, very well.

~295MB/s read/write speed - two of the component disks can only hit ~75MB/s on their own. Eventually they'll be replaced by newer, faster disks and I'll see closer to 400MB/s.

Hmmm, shows ya what I know. This is the 1st time I'm hearing of it at least that I can recall. And why are you calling it "software RAID"? Is this not possible with a dedicated RAID controller or something?

 

[Mac Husky]

(...)

Thanks a lot for your detailed explanations.

If it is right, what cmaier wrote

Note that with an 09 MP, you will probably have to pu your disks in an external enclosure I you us a non-apple raid card. The new MP doesn't use cables to connect the drives. You should take the cost of an enclosure into account.

than RAID5 is not making much sence in the workflow by using third party?!

I could make a backup easier with Time Machine on a big HD inside the Mac.
And a second one (e.g. weekly) to an external drive via FW800.

Further Question:
Using a WD VelociRaptor as system drive, would it be usefull to build a partition including it in a RAID0 scratch for Photoshop?
Or should one leave the system disk beeing system disk at all and better build RAIDO scratch using disk 2 and 3 alone?

 

[sushi]

Though at worst, there's always data recovery centres, unfortunately it could be costly for the domestic user.

As long as you don't have a mechanical failure that damages the disk.

In these cases, even the data recovery folks will be limited as to what they can recover.

 

[NoNameBrand]

Hmmm, shows ya what I know. This is the 1st time I'm hearing of it at least that I can recall. And why are you calling it "software RAID"? Is this not possible with a dedicated RAID controller or something?

In my experience with HP & Dell servers, you have to use whole disks in your sets with a RAID controller, and then partition on top of that, which isn't as useful. Intel has something called "Matric RAID" which is built into some of their chipsets that allows different RAID levels on the same disks, but it's not your typical hardware RAID controller with its own processor or battery backup.

 

[UltraNEO*]

As long as you don't have a mechanical failure that damages the disk.

In these cases, even the data recovery folks will be limited as to what they can recover.

Very True...

but with a 4disc RAID5 failure, there's still a chance to recover lost data - there's the redundancy of one, remember?