Using two USB drives in RAID1

all I can say is I am trying this right now, and disk utility raid1 sucks total nuts. Every time I try to create a Raid 1 with my two totally, identitical seagate drives, it crashs osx. OSX will CONTINUE to crash until the disks are umounted.

DO NOT COUNT ON OSX RAID 1. especially with external HDs...its just does not work.

 

I don't understand why you would be trying RAID 1 over USB. RAID 1 is all about data safety... and a USB connection can be pulled out at any time. Add to that the overall slowness of USB in general for HD-style operations to the duplicate nature of mirroring (everything would have to go over the USB buss twice), and you are going to unreasonably degrading the performance.

An external RAID still has the problem of pulling the plug, but at least you are not sending the data twice for every operation.

 

Agreed, it's an ugly solution. Either get a dedicated solution with it's own controller or just find a program to do automate daily backups from one drive to the other. Automated daily backups are a lot safer as well, since they remove the human error factor!

 

If you really want to RAID 1 together two drives, I'd suggest using FW800 to do it. Going over USB is going to limit your speeds, as has been mentioned. Otherwise, using CarbonCopyCloner is great. Scheduled backups/clones and the program doesn't have to be running for the schedule to happen. Much better solution that RAID 1 over USB/FW.

Also, not all RAID enclosures are loud. I have a NewerTechnology Guardian MAXimus, and it's reasonably quiet. If nothing is going on, I can hear it, but my keyboard is louder than it is. Playing some quiet music is enough to get to the point where I can't hear it.