Most common (for home users) RAID1 is mirroring 2 drives. Basically you have 2 identical drives, exactly same data stored on both, but your system sees them as single drive.
You loose capacity (if you have 2x 1TB drive, your system will see and use it as only 1TB) but you get redundancy - one drive dies, your system is still up and running from the other drive. You replace dead drive and system rebuilds RAID (copies everything from healthy hard drive to a new one).
You can still loose your data in case of some huge disaster (power spike burns both of your drives together with rest of your system) but realistically you are pretty safe - chance of both drives passing away together is slim. Of course if one dies you'll have to replace it as soon as possible to reduce risk.
But I'm not sure if any Mac short of Mac Pro can do 2 drives..?
But I'm not sure if any Mac short of Mac Pro can do 2 drives..?
Doing RAID 1 on two external drives is done exactly the same way, I've done RAID 1 on both internals pairs and external pairs.
But if the first external drive is already a backup, RAID 1 isn't really doing you much better, ideally, a second backup really should be a drive that's off site except for a weekly backup so any disasters hopefully don't kill all your data and all your backups.
Comments
Dear mister cutter .
back off dude
already got banned.
Yes and they died .
How does raid work ?
Most common (for home users) RAID1 is mirroring 2 drives. Basically you have 2 identical drives, exactly same data stored on both, but your system sees them as single drive.
You loose capacity (if you have 2x 1TB drive, your system will see and use it as only 1TB) but you get redundancy - one drive dies, your system is still up and running from the other drive. You replace dead drive and system rebuilds RAID (copies everything from healthy hard drive to a new one).
You can still loose your data in case of some huge disaster (power spike burns both of your drives together with rest of your system) but realistically you are pretty safe - chance of both drives passing away together is slim. Of course if one dies you'll have to replace it as soon as possible to reduce risk.
But I'm not sure if any Mac short of Mac Pro can do 2 drives..?
But I'm not sure if any Mac short of Mac Pro can do 2 drives..?
Doing RAID 1 on two external drives is done exactly the same way, I've done RAID 1 on both internals pairs and external pairs.
But if the first external drive is already a backup, RAID 1 isn't really doing you much better, ideally, a second backup really should be a drive that's off site except for a weekly backup so any disasters hopefully don't kill all your data and all your backups.