Over the last month or two I've read many threads that touch on RAID and Boot Camp but have not gotten a clear enough impression to decide what to do, so I ask the following... It's a bit longer to provide context of what I'm looking for and why.
I have a MP1,1 that is currently configured with the original 500GB HDD as the OS 10.5.8 boot drive. I have 3 x 1 TB Caviar Blacks in bays 2-4. Bay 2 is for boot camp with XP, bays 3&4 are a software (Apple) mirrored pair that is used for most data. I have a SeriTek 2SE2 SATA card that drives a SeriTek5/PM enclosure that has 5 x 500GB drives. One disk of the 5 is simply a spare used to clone the boot disk to ensure I can restore if something goes wrong when I'm upgrading or changing the system (which saved my butt many times). The other 4 are two different striped (two drive) RAIDs using SoftRaid. I also have a 1 TB time machine that only backs up the OSX boot drive. Everything is on a UPS.
I have lots of space because I like to have the ability to clone and un-do if something doesn't work and I have lots of video files that I play with. A 30 minute race is typically a single file that's about 2 Gb (MPEG2). I expect to move to 1080p video this year, so files will be much bigger yet. I also back up my MBP3,1 to the external drives on the MP and sync files between the two systems with chronosync.
I'm looking to move from a simple software stripe to a RAID 10 or 50 for the external drives and also moving from a software mirror to a hardware mirror for the internal drives. I had very good success using Parallels for XP in the past but wanted the video processing to go faster so I recently created the BC drive. However, in XP with Parallels I had access to all my disk space. With XP under BC I don't (and you guys seem to think it's risky using XP to read and write to the OSX volumes). So, I'm looking for a solution to ensure XP can see the external volumes and a solution to provide hardware RAID functionality for both Leopard and XP.
I expect some will simply say to move to SL and Win7. I'm not prepared to do that (yet) as I'm not going to see the full benefit of the 64 bit OS with the MP1,1 and I don't believe either the hardware or the software will work in SL or Win7. When I first tried to upgrade to SL (10.6 initial release), my software RAIDs (broke both the Apple and SoftRaid versions). Using the "if it's not broke', don't fix it" I moved back to 10.5 and got everything running quickly and easily. I only use XP to run my race car data analysis software and track video software on the XP side before I move the initially processed video over to the OSX side to run Final Cut, iMove and iDVD (among others).
Thanks for your patience. Suggestions for a RAID card that will not require lots of flashing/troubleshooting and work in both 'worlds'?
I have a MP1,1 that is currently configured with the original 500GB HDD as the OS 10.5.8 boot drive. I have 3 x 1 TB Caviar Blacks in bays 2-4. Bay 2 is for boot camp with XP, bays 3&4 are a software (Apple) mirrored pair that is used for most data. I have a SeriTek 2SE2 SATA card that drives a SeriTek5/PM enclosure that has 5 x 500GB drives. One disk of the 5 is simply a spare used to clone the boot disk to ensure I can restore if something goes wrong when I'm upgrading or changing the system (which saved my butt many times). The other 4 are two different striped (two drive) RAIDs using SoftRaid. I also have a 1 TB time machine that only backs up the OSX boot drive. Everything is on a UPS.
I have lots of space because I like to have the ability to clone and un-do if something doesn't work and I have lots of video files that I play with. A 30 minute race is typically a single file that's about 2 Gb (MPEG2). I expect to move to 1080p video this year, so files will be much bigger yet. I also back up my MBP3,1 to the external drives on the MP and sync files between the two systems with chronosync.
I'm looking to move from a simple software stripe to a RAID 10 or 50 for the external drives and also moving from a software mirror to a hardware mirror for the internal drives. I had very good success using Parallels for XP in the past but wanted the video processing to go faster so I recently created the BC drive. However, in XP with Parallels I had access to all my disk space. With XP under BC I don't (and you guys seem to think it's risky using XP to read and write to the OSX volumes). So, I'm looking for a solution to ensure XP can see the external volumes and a solution to provide hardware RAID functionality for both Leopard and XP.
I expect some will simply say to move to SL and Win7. I'm not prepared to do that (yet) as I'm not going to see the full benefit of the 64 bit OS with the MP1,1 and I don't believe either the hardware or the software will work in SL or Win7. When I first tried to upgrade to SL (10.6 initial release), my software RAIDs (broke both the Apple and SoftRaid versions). Using the "if it's not broke', don't fix it" I moved back to 10.5 and got everything running quickly and easily. I only use XP to run my race car data analysis software and track video software on the XP side before I move the initially processed video over to the OSX side to run Final Cut, iMove and iDVD (among others).
Thanks for your patience. Suggestions for a RAID card that will not require lots of flashing/troubleshooting and work in both 'worlds'?