09-01-2006, 07:23 PM
I did some searching, but what I found was pretty sketchy.
I currently have two new Seagate 320GB SATA drives (model #ST3320620AS; the newest SATAII with "Perpendicular Recording Technology") in my G5/dual-2GHZ (second rev., I believe). I took the two older 160GB drives that were in the tower and put them in a dual-drive SATA case from OWC and installed a FirmTek SATA controller card in the G5 as well.
I've been trying to learn more about RAIDs, but with minimal progress. From what I've read, I would get a noticeable speed increase if I made the two internal drives into a striped array (RAID 0?), but I would then have to make sure I had good backups since that setup would be hosed if either drive failed. Am I on the right track so far?
Specific questions:
1) I currently have the two internal 320GB drives setup with one as boot drive and the other a clone of that; there is ~160GB of data on each. How would I go about making them into a RAID 0 setup? I'm guessing I'd have to clone the startup drive to an external, create the RAID, then restore from the clone. Is this correct? Are there tips I should be aware of in attempting this?
2) My temptation would then be to have the two older 160GB drives setup as a mirrored array as a backup of the boot-drive striped array. Even though the startup drive would be much larger, I could back up my music and video libraries separately (which total around 75 gigs), and I'm sure I'd have plenty of space for the remaining files. Does this make sense to you?
3) Any and all advice/resources for learning more about this would be very much appreciated. I'm already leaning towards buying SoftRAID, since it sounds like the tool to have if you're going to be working with RAIDs much at all. Is there anything else I'm missing?
Thanks very much in advance,
John-o
I currently have two new Seagate 320GB SATA drives (model #ST3320620AS; the newest SATAII with "Perpendicular Recording Technology") in my G5/dual-2GHZ (second rev., I believe). I took the two older 160GB drives that were in the tower and put them in a dual-drive SATA case from OWC and installed a FirmTek SATA controller card in the G5 as well.
I've been trying to learn more about RAIDs, but with minimal progress. From what I've read, I would get a noticeable speed increase if I made the two internal drives into a striped array (RAID 0?), but I would then have to make sure I had good backups since that setup would be hosed if either drive failed. Am I on the right track so far?
Specific questions:
1) I currently have the two internal 320GB drives setup with one as boot drive and the other a clone of that; there is ~160GB of data on each. How would I go about making them into a RAID 0 setup? I'm guessing I'd have to clone the startup drive to an external, create the RAID, then restore from the clone. Is this correct? Are there tips I should be aware of in attempting this?
2) My temptation would then be to have the two older 160GB drives setup as a mirrored array as a backup of the boot-drive striped array. Even though the startup drive would be much larger, I could back up my music and video libraries separately (which total around 75 gigs), and I'm sure I'd have plenty of space for the remaining files. Does this make sense to you?
3) Any and all advice/resources for learning more about this would be very much appreciated. I'm already leaning towards buying SoftRAID, since it sounds like the tool to have if you're going to be working with RAIDs much at all. Is there anything else I'm missing?
Thanks very much in advance,
John-o