RAID questions…

[john-o]

Well, if I can't boot from a software RAID, that answers that question! I think I'll go with something similar to the Ninja's suggestion. Seems to make the most sense to me, confused as I may be by all this!!

Thanks guys...

[The Grim Ninja]

If you have the cash for it, go for the 750 GB Seagate http://shop1.outpost.com/product/4924331 for $330.

That drive is probably extremely fast and it's huge.


Another option would be a Western Digital Raptor drive (10kRPM) for a scratch and/or boot disk. But I don't know how much it'd help you.

[Harbourmaster]

What's the fastest Boot drive? http://www.barefeats.com/quad08.html

Good stuff from AMUG on SoftRAID3.5: http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/r...traid/351/

[mattkime]

The only reason to have a mirrored internal raid is because you can't be bothered with a moment of downtime. For most people, a nightly SuperDuper clone is plenty.

RAID isn't really a backup solution. It copies mistakes and corruption just as fast as a single drive.

[john-o]

Question: do the Mac Pros support hardware RAIDs out of the box? How else would they support booting from dual drives as shown on that BareFeats site??? If so, are they the first Macs to support hardware RAIDs?

[JJ]

[quote The Grim Ninja]You cannot boot a software RAID.

Ever.



I would suggest you take a 320 for the startup disk. RAID the two 160's into a 320 GB drive (less formatting) and use that volume for scratch disk. Backup to the other 320 GB drive.


If you have money, just buy a newer big drive that will probably be faster than the RAID anyway, and use it.
I have a software RAID setup with 2 Raptor drives. I boot from it everytime I boot the computer. Am I misunderstanding what you are saying?

[The Grim Ninja]

Probably. Sorta.

You can boot from a MIRROR software RAID.
You can boot from a hardware RAID (if the card supports it).

You can not boot from a striped/span software RAID (unless things have changed drastically very recently)

[JJ]

RAID 0 and I boot from it daily. I used Disk Utility to set the RAID 0 (striped) array up.

So I guess things have changed.

[Silencio]

[quote john-o]Question: do the Mac Pros support hardware RAIDs out of the box? How else would they support booting from dual drives as shown on that BareFeats site??? If so, are they the first Macs to support hardware RAIDs?
The Mac Pro doesn't support hardware RAID: the Intel chipset Apple uses in the Mac Pro is supposed to support hardware RAID, but there are bugs in the implementation, so Apple doesn't use it.

[john-o]

Man, this RAID thing is just rife with confusing, sometimes conflicting, information, isn't it?!?

So it sounds like Grim Ninja was incorrect about being able to boot from a software striped array (RAID 0), as people are doing it now, and the new Mac Pros are capable of doing it as well.

JJ, can you chime back in with your take on my original questions? The early replies seemed to agree that there wouldn't be a huge advantage to doing what I described, and that there would be some big drawbacks as well. Do you agree? Could you give us some specifics on what your setup is and what the benefits are?

Thanks,
John-o