how is apple's soft raid implemented?
a friend of mine runs a linux box with a really cool disk setup... (WARNING: NERD ALERT!) 
with only two ordinairy sata drives he can have striped swap, mirrored system volume and lots of storage too...
i'd like to use something similar on my mac of course, so i have a few questions for you all:
1) can you use partitions of disks to build a raid set, not just whole disks?
i use a 80GB disk now and i got a left over 40GB, can i split the 80GB in two 40GB partitions and use one of those partitions and the extra disk in a raid set?
2) how is (read) load balanced in a mirrored set with apple's implementation? (the implementation in linux is tuned for low access time which is what i'm looking for, even though i know it's just a matter of 10-15% at best...)
3) when more than one disk is used, is macos 'smart' enough to stripe the swap/virtual memory or can i set that up somehow?
4) are there any better raid software tools than apple's?
tia!
with only two ordinairy sata drives he can have striped swap, mirrored system volume and lots of storage too...
i'd like to use something similar on my mac of course, so i have a few questions for you all:
1) can you use partitions of disks to build a raid set, not just whole disks?
i use a 80GB disk now and i got a left over 40GB, can i split the 80GB in two 40GB partitions and use one of those partitions and the extra disk in a raid set?
2) how is (read) load balanced in a mirrored set with apple's implementation? (the implementation in linux is tuned for low access time which is what i'm looking for, even though i know it's just a matter of 10-15% at best...)
3) when more than one disk is used, is macos 'smart' enough to stripe the swap/virtual memory or can i set that up somehow?
4) are there any better raid software tools than apple's?
tia!
Comments
i'll answer some of my questions myself just in case someone else was interested...
1) can you use partitions of disks to build a raid set, not just whole disks?
yes you can.
3) when more than one disk is used, is macos 'smart' enough to stripe the swap/virtual memory or can i set that up somehow?
no it isn't. macos uses the boot partition for virual memory and even though it is possible to move it to another it not exactly trivial...
4) are there any better raid software tools than apple's?
i like the cli tool diskutil better, much more options and features.
for example you can turn partitions to raid sets without even erasing anything. (maybe that's possible with the gui too, but i like text when i do scary things, lots and lots of text.)
now, the second question is the only one i havent been able to find any good answer to...
2) how is (read) load balanced in a mirrored set with apple's implementation?
i would guess it's a non-fancy round-robin style scheme, but i can't really tell...?