Disk Utility > RAID
hi,
i just played around with the utilities and discovered the raid feature in the disk utility. could somebody explain to me what i can do exactly with this feature? i have two ide drives in my g4 (30 and 40 gbs), what raid configurations can i create and what are the benefits? will access be faster? or can i create one big drive with 70 gbs?
would be nice if somebody could explain or even tell his own experiences...
thanx in advance, phil
i just played around with the utilities and discovered the raid feature in the disk utility. could somebody explain to me what i can do exactly with this feature? i have two ide drives in my g4 (30 and 40 gbs), what raid configurations can i create and what are the benefits? will access be faster? or can i create one big drive with 70 gbs?
would be nice if somebody could explain or even tell his own experiences...
thanx in advance, phil
Comments
The RAID levels that Apple provides can either 'mirror' two of the same drives (for protection) or 'stripe' two drives (size doesn't have to be the same) into one logical volume and this could/should/would mean faster access.
The problem is OS X and/or the firmware Apple has can't boot from a RAID (yet?). So to make use of RAID at the moment you'd need 3 drives... The 1st for OS X booting and the 2nd+3rd for the RAID.
Just a friendly warning... If you do chose to use a stripe RAID you gotta be very good about backing up since all you need is ONE of the two drives to die and ALL of you data (on both drives) is pretty much trashed.
The RAID spec also provides for a way to add 3 or more drives to a stripe where one (or more) of the drives is used as a parity drive. With this type of setup if one of the drives in the (group of 3 or more) die then software can 'rebuild' the dead drive based on review of the contents of the two other drives.
That type of RAID is what I hope we'll see in the 10.2 release. Mirror is fine for data security but stripe (without a parity drive) is something I'd consider too risky.
Hope this helps...
Dave
P.S. Oh... I'd love to see bootable RAID support too but I have no idea what that would take to do on Apples part.