RAID/JBOD newbie seeking assistance.

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
OK, so my next major piece of hardware - a MacBook Pro - is largely going to be for running Logic Pro. As such, I'm going to need an external storage solution for all the masters and whatnot, because music sucks up a fair whack of space and my iTunes library alone means that the internal hard drive is going to be under considerable pressure from day one.



So I've been looking at Firewire solutions, and I saw this:



Freecom 1TB DataTank



Now, say I wanted to use this - how would I set it up for RAID 0/1/JBOD? Will I have to sort it on the hardware, or will I have to go into something like disk utility? And how easy is it to do?



Sorry about the possibly silly questions, RAID, JBOD, OMGWTFBBQ and the rest of these acronyms are all new to me.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    if your goal is speed then i would go for SATA with an expresscard|34



    head over to fwdepot.com or cooldrives.com and put something together on your own to make it cheaper... go to anandtech.com and check out the place with the cheapest drives... it's usually zipzoomfly.com but it changes week to week.



    I don't know which is fastest of the following two options:

    -Hardware RAID 0 over FW800

    -Software RAID 0 over SATA II





    if you don't do any RAID, then a SATA drive over Expresscard SATA will be faster than a SATA or PATA drive over FW800



    Check out this article:

    http://www.barefeats.com/hard48.html



    i personally would feel most comfortable with expresscard SATA II with RAID 1 of two big drives



    RAID 0 is risky if you value your data



    also if you use FW audio then you have your data and audio on separate busses



    are you using a 15" or 17" mbp?
  • Reply 2 of 5
    15", 2.16GHz.
  • Reply 3 of 5
    that means you don't already have FW 800 so I would go with the SATA II expresscard|34 and two 750GB Seagate SATA drives with software RAID in Apple's disk utility.



    pick up a dual drive SATA case from a place like www.cooldrives.com and find the cheapest place to get drives from anandtech.com... it is usually zipzoomfly.com



    Here's a good enclosure

    http://www.cooldrives.com/dudralenfors.html





    Set it up RAID 1 if your data is important to you or RAID 0 if speed is important to you....



    keep in mind that if you go with SATA you are limited by how many drives you can set up on your laptop since you will only have two connections using an expresscard and you cannot daisychain like with firewire.....



    if storage is an issue you can always add firewire storage in the future to backup and store and continue to use the SATA drives for speed and space...





    finally you could do two sata raptors in that enclosure and then get a firewire enclosure for main redundant storage..... however i don't know how well that enclosure will handle the heat generated by two raptors



    how much data do you have now? what is the nature of the data? do you have a backup method already in place?
  • Reply 4 of 5
    mikefmikef Posts: 698member
    FYI, the C2D 2.16GHz has FW800...
  • Reply 5 of 5
    I just purchased an Octo Mac Pro and am about to drop two new 750GB SATA Drives in and drop the stock HD back to the third drive slot to be used strictly for the Time Machine feature in Leopard. When I bootup with the Install Disc that came with it, will I be able to create a concatenated striped RAID with the two new HD's?



    I know a striped RAID will give the computer much faster access, but I don't want two discs at 750GB apiece, I want one volume to show up weighing in at roughly 1.5TB. Will that work? Is a concatenated volume just another name for a striped RAID?



    Please explain this a bit more. From what I read on Apple's Support website, there's not much discussion about it.



    Thanks in advance,

    Brian
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