I'm trying to add RAID1 (disk mirroring) backup to a G5 iMac.
Because it has iSight, firewire scanner etc, only one firewire port on the iMac is free. (and it's FW400 too)
I've thought about daisychaining two firewire HDD enclosures, and using OSX's software RAID1 on the two drives.
But, everything that I read tells me that:
1. OSX's software mirroring is slow,
2. the two disks will be bottlenecked by sharing a single FW400 port.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems part of the bottleneck is caused by OSX sending everything in duplicate over the single cable.
Hence, I'm thinking if I can find a dual disk firewire enclosure that incorporates RAID1, then OSX will only need to send a single copy of the data over the cable, and the hardware in the enclosure will sort out the mirroring.
However I cannot seem to find any sort of cheapish RAID1 enclosure. All the cheapish dual disk RAID enclosures I can find, while very pretty, only do hardware RAID0 (disk striping) which is useless for my needs.
e.g. http://www.tuaw.com/2005/07/27/owc-mercury-raid/
and http://store.miglia.com/s.nl/sc.2/category.27/.f
Can you help?
Can you either:
1. verify that software RAID1 using two enclosures daisychained to a single FW400 port works fine without slowdowns,
OR 2. point me to a nice cheapish hardware RAID1 enclosure, about 250 quid/ 350bucks?
Note, am in the UK so hope the suggested hardware will actually be available here.
Many thanks,
Tomato
Because it has iSight, firewire scanner etc, only one firewire port on the iMac is free. (and it's FW400 too)
I've thought about daisychaining two firewire HDD enclosures, and using OSX's software RAID1 on the two drives.
But, everything that I read tells me that:
1. OSX's software mirroring is slow,
2. the two disks will be bottlenecked by sharing a single FW400 port.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems part of the bottleneck is caused by OSX sending everything in duplicate over the single cable.
Hence, I'm thinking if I can find a dual disk firewire enclosure that incorporates RAID1, then OSX will only need to send a single copy of the data over the cable, and the hardware in the enclosure will sort out the mirroring.
However I cannot seem to find any sort of cheapish RAID1 enclosure. All the cheapish dual disk RAID enclosures I can find, while very pretty, only do hardware RAID0 (disk striping) which is useless for my needs.
e.g. http://www.tuaw.com/2005/07/27/owc-mercury-raid/
and http://store.miglia.com/s.nl/sc.2/category.27/.f
Can you help?
Can you either:
1. verify that software RAID1 using two enclosures daisychained to a single FW400 port works fine without slowdowns,
OR 2. point me to a nice cheapish hardware RAID1 enclosure, about 250 quid/ 350bucks?
Note, am in the UK so hope the suggested hardware will actually be available here.
Many thanks,
Tomato