RAID Setup Question

[stedwick]

I have an internal 250 gb hard drive and an external 250 gb firewire hard drive.

I want to buy a 500 gb external firewire hard drive and then do the following:

1) Concatenate my two 250 gb hard drives.

2) Mirror that new concatenated drive onto the 500 gb one.

Is that possible / recommended?

I think it can be done with disk utility, but I don't know if it can be done with only three drives. As in, can I "RAIDify" a drive that already has data on it? Because if I can't, it seems that I would need a 4th drive to temporarily store my data while I create the RAIDs.

Any help / thoughts are appreciated!

Philip

[Ebby]

First off you are messing with partitions so yea, you would need to store your data somewhere else for a bit. I am not sure if Disk utility will allow you to use a drive in multiple software RAID setups, but it seems possible to first create a RAID0 from two drives and then a RAID1 with the 500GB.

I have a similar setup with two RAID5 arrays joined in a RAID0 in Dusk Utility. The difference with mine is that the two RAID5 arrays are hardware-based and look like a single drive that can be merged together in Disk Utility.