RAID My New HD?

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Okay, so Best Buy had a great deal on a Western Digital 120GB HD, so I got it. Installing it was easy but I was suprised to see that I could set up this drive as a RAID.



I know nothing about RAIDs, short of the fact that it will make my two drives act as one. Can I do really do this? If so, should I do this? Are there any advantages?



Any advice would be appreciated.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    Did the source of the information you found have any instructions?
  • Reply 2 of 5
    scadboyscadboy Posts: 189member
    Me fail english? That's unpossible.



    This doesn't make any sense, at all. RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independant (or inexpensive) Disks. Originally designed to allow for mass storage from multiple inexpensive drives, the very nature of the word means that there needs to be more than one disk involved.



    You use a RAID array to either mirror the contents of your harddrive, as a backup in the case of equipment failure, or in order to accumulare mass storage from multiple drives. It has no use for a single harddrive.



    Or perhaps I misread this, do you have two harddrives in your machine? In this case, yeah, it's possible, but if you want to do a mirror, it works best when all of the harddrives are of the same size. if you want to combine the two drives as one, then go for it, I guess.



    To me, it seems rather elaborate process, and I like to keep things like that separated. Think of your harddrives like the tires on your car, if you're going to replace one, you should replace them all, so the wear is equal. You drop in this new 120GB drive and raid it with the old drive that's been kicking around in your box for awhile, and then one day, BAM your old drive dies. There's no easy way to recover what was on the old drive, and no gaurantee that the data on the larger drive will be accessible.



    If you really want an uber-gig storage solution, replace your other harddrive with one of those cheap 120s and raid them together. .24 terabytes in your tower, hells yeah.



    ciao,



    michael



    p.s.

    when asking questions like this in the future, I'd recommend stating your machine type and specs to help avoid such confusion, and to aide in the advising process
  • Reply 3 of 5
    Okay, apologies for not being more clear.



    Yes, I added this drive as a second drive. I've got an original dual1G, and the stock 80GB drive is still in and functioning as my primary drive.



    Like I said, I know next to nothing about RAIDs and had been under the impression that I would need some additional hardware if I wanted to set one up. Now that it looks like I can I was just wondering for there was any reason why I should.



    Personally, I'm inclined to agree with you scadboy. I was just planning on having two internal drives that show up on my desktop as two seperate volumes. Easy and eliminates confusion. And, if I am missing out on some benefit then obviously I don't know what it is...so I guess I won't really miss it at all!
  • Reply 4 of 5
    Don't use the OSX software RAID. While it might not be horrible, you wont gain hardly any benefits from using it. If you want to setup a RAID, go get a Sonnet (www.sonnettech.com) raid card and pick up another identical drive. then you can either set up a mirrored or striped array. But chances are you have no need for either one.
  • Reply 5 of 5
    der kopfder kopf Posts: 2,275member
    These HD vendors often bigmouth you by throwing the word RAID in your face, while they actually mean RAID-0, being a mere copy (and a full copy at that) of your primary drive there. Their software then takes care of copying every change you make automatically to your alternate drive. This is in no way the more sophisticated RAID-1 to 6, with striped array and the works. So, if you have an 80 gigger as master, and you keep it about full, then there will be 80 gigs used on your other drive - the copy. Do you want this?
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