Mac Pro :: Home Folder On RAID Array And Data On Drives
Aug 12, 2009
I have two choices.
1. Apple's Mac Pro RAID Controller, Four Drives, RAID 0+1. One big disk, highest cost.
2. Or, some other RAID Controller (?), Three matching drives, RAID 5. Then, 1 big drive for OS/Applications/Time Machine.
I'd probably move my Home folder to the RAID Array and have just my data striping amongst those drives. Has anyone had a dilemma like this before? I like the idea of hardware separation of my Home folder from the OS.
Is it possible to get a highpoint raid controller and put those 4 drives in a raid 5 array (and then create partitions inside that array) - or do you need to have 1 drive by itself for the operating system, and then create a raid array using the remaining 3 drives?
Lastly, are the highpoint 3500 series a decent card? and fully compatible?
I have a bunch of Mac Computers here and I want to make a file server for them with about 5 drives in an RAID array to be a little bit secure. I am fairly certain how to go about and build myself a basic file server for a bunch of PCs networked together, but I am not sure about how to do it for a network of Macs.
Is it possible to mirror a RAID-0 array to a single drive?
For example, I will be setting up 3x1TB on a RAID-0 (striped) array and i want to mirror it to one 1TB drive. Is that possible or do i have to resort to Time Machine ... ugh
and YES i've already STFA! no answers as of the start of this thread
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-edit i assuming Time Machine backs up the "volumes" and not the "drives"
Difficulty deciding between 1 or 2. Unsure about real world performance gain of 2. No experience with SSDs or RAID 0. Worried about alignment and sleep/hibernate issues. Stock 5400rpm 320GB will go inside eSATA enclosure. Does anybody have a good eSATA ExpressCard/34 to recommend? I don't care about the SuperDrive. But I'll keep it for Care warranty purposes.
I have a Early 2008 Mac Pro. I have the Apple Hardware Raid Card Installed. I have 4 2TB disks installed. Currently I've got the system disk setup in Bay 1 as a single disk. Then I have the disks in bays 2 through 4 setup as a raid 5. I've been thinking that I might be better off to make all 4 disks into a raid 5 array and then just make volumes for the system disk and my work disk. My goal is to have a system volume an a scratch/work volume for image and video editing.
Well,finaly it's bootable and raid bootable.Does anybody know is ti bootcampable?I just come back from windows,I find I lost so much,I can't even use foobar2000 and my 9800gt.
I have 160.5MB on my HD, an I have done everything I know how to do to free it up but still nothing!I'm wondering, can I move the home folders to my external hardrives?
how can i re-create a hidden lion partition after creating a RAID 1 array for Lion Server 10.7.3 My new mac-mini did not come in the array i'd expect it to come with being a server?
The MBP has one expresscard slot. So if you use an eSata adapter (even if it has dual eSATA ports) it would only have one eSATA channel And that would be limited further by the express card slot and more still by the type of card (make, model, etc..). My question is: with Barefeats claiming even the best eSATA card for a MBP being 200MB/s (even if you claim less) using a dual eSATA RAID connection for a stripped array would be limited to 100MB/s per port. Is this correct? Because I'm trying to understand this to see if it's worth building a RAID setup for my MBP when I'm home.
I've asked this numorous times and get helpful advice but not addressng this specific and fundamental fact. I am not interested in FW800 because I want the fastest I can get but want it to make sense. I would also reask my other questions about my situation but this question comes first.
The time has come to move to a RAID setup in my Mac Pro. Ideally I'd like to run 4 1.5TB SATA drives in a RAID 5 or 10. It seems there are a LOT of threads on this topic all filled with different information, so I have a few questions...
Which RAID cards are bootable?
Do any work like the Apple card and interface with the drives through the logic board?
If not, how do you connect the internal drives to the RAID card in their stock bay locations?
I just got a brand new MAC PRO desktop. It came with a 600GB HDD. I purchased a second identical internal 600GB HDD. I wanted to do setup a RAID 1 using these 2 drives. Currently the main drive has the OS and all my other apps installed. I installed the 2nd drive and was fooling with disk utility. I'm not sure how to set this up however. I tried numerous guides online but I just cant figure it out.
MAC PRO (takes up to 4 internal drives) - currently installed 2 identical drives Leopard Using Disk utility
The RAID tab says "online" and the status is green (indicating the RAID is working). However on my desktop i see the 2nd hardddrive mounted with no contents in it. I just want to able to use the 2nd drive as a mirror so this way if one fails I'm still up and running.
I just got the apple mac pro raid card today, but after I connect it and all 4 SAS drives, the MAC OSX Installtion program can not detect the SAS at all, I open the RAID Utility but no dirve there, the battery is in charging status.
I currently have a 2TB WD mirror edition that is setup in RAID 1 so it will mirror all my data. Now I also have a bunch of other drives laying around which I also feel the need to back up and currently I am doing this by doing a whole bunch of dragging and dropping and copying and pasting etc etc etc and this is making me very tired. I know that a setup is possible in disk utility but I am not at all sure about how to configure it so I wont lose any of my data.
Some details about my setup: Mac OS X 10.5.6 PowerPc G5 Harddrives: two 1TB WD MyBooks, and two 500gig WD Mybooks --> these pairs need to mirror each other and make my life less of a hassle.
I'm about to configure my 2006 MP with one of Apple's RAID cards using RAID5. I currently have 4x 750GB drives that I can use, but I can see needing more space in the not too distant future. When I do need more space, can I simply drop in a 2TB drive, let the RAID system reconfigure itself, and repeat this until I have all 4 drives in place? Is there a better or different way to do this? I know that if one of the drives is larger than the others, then only a drive space equivalent to the smaller drives will be used in RAID5. After addition of the fourth drive (per the above scheme), will the array then use the full 2TB of each drive?
So I have a Mac Pro with Bay 1 acting as my regular start up drive. I also have three other Western Digital 500GB hard drives that I have been using as a RAID backup system. However, when I place all three of the RAID hard drives into Bays 2, 3, and 4, the computer will not boot. It never reaches the Apple logo, and continually tries to restart. So I figured one of the hard drives was corrupt.
However, I have tested all three hard drives in Bay 2 and the computer will boot just fine. I have also tested each bay individually (i.e. the same RAID hard drive in each of the Bays seperately) and the computer still boots fine. I can even power up with any two hard drives in Bays 2 and 3. The only time I can't power up is when all three of the hard drives are occupying all three of the extra bays.
Also, none of the RAID hard drives show up in Disk Utility or on the desktop. Shouldn't I be able to view them as normal internal or external hard drives being plugged into my Mac? They do show up in RAID Utility. Is this normal with RAID hard drives, or should they always show up in Disk Utility?
I created a new RAID backup with two of the drives together (Bays 2 and 3) and it recognizes it in System profiler. However, I want to be able to use all three drives for the RAID.
I have a 8-core MP 2.8Ghz with 10gb ram and Ati 2600HD. I'll someday replace the ATI with a quadro (all my application is 3d/CAD/Design) I'm installing 4 of the WD640 drives, they arrive on Friday.
I would love to order the CalDigit RAID card but after searching I finally figured out it's not available until next month.
That said, I need my system to start working ASAP and I don't want to wait if I don't have to.
I'm a designer, I need fast scratch so some striping needs to be involved. I also need data protection. At this capacity Time Machine isn't going to be of any use and I'd prefer redundancy anyway.
The 4 WD640s are replacing: 1 750gb 7200.11, 2 WD SE16 500GBs, and 1 320GB (Apple Stock Drive).
I would like to sell some of those drives to defray the cost of this endeavor but I'm open to keeping 1 or possibly 2 as external drives or stuffing one into the optical bay with a converter.
I want speed and reliability, of course! But really the largest motivator here is the combined drive aspect. Having so many volumes is driving me nuts.
My intention had been RAID 5 or 6 but I now know that Apple Software RAID can't do this. So now it seems with software RAID 0+1 would be the only option.
Realistically, does the cpu performance degradation outweight the speed gained from striping the drives? It's so difficult to determine bottlenecks.
Any thoughts on my best bet without/before the RAID card arrives. Can I migrate the array after installing the card without data loss?
If I just JBOD the drives can the concatenated set be broken up ever? I was thinking I could JBOD until the card came.
Anyone know if it's possible to attach two USB hard drives to a Time Capsule via a USB hub, and configure them in a RAID1 configuration and use them as my Time Machine backup disk? I would then use the TCs internal drive as network storage.
Can I install a Raid Controller and connect say two drives to it, specially for windows? Will it be bootable? Or perhaps even connect the iPass of the four internal bays to an Adaptec 5405 and get a separate cable for my Mac Drive. Will both be bootable? What if I just want to boot Windows for now? I sometimes need to convert my early 2008 Mac Pro into a rather beefy Windows workstation and the lack of HW Raid is rather irritating.
I have read that it is "a shortcut to disaster" if I do a RAID0 (or any other RAID for that matter), if the Hard Drives are dissimilar. I have the original HD 149GB (now 5 years old), and have bought a new 1T HD, and was planning on setting them up as a striped RAID0. Is this a bad idea? Should I purchase a second 1T HD and do a RAID0 or RAID1 setup instead?
I have a Mac Pro with all hard drive slots filled. The first two disks (includes startup disk) are independent, and 3 and 4 are set up in a RAID 1 mirror. I have to take my computer into the Apple store for a repair and I'd like to just take out all the disks except for my startup disk... however I'm not sure how to go about doing so for the RAID. If I take the drives out, and boot up the computer with them no longer inside, will the computer "freak out" and/or will the computer no longer recognize the RAID if I put them back in again later?
If the latter is the case, will the data be lost or would I just have to set up the RAID again... and if I do that, will that also cause the data on the drives to be lost, or is it possible for it to mirror them again without needing to make changes to the data?
What should I be doing to my drives before building arrays with them?
Hitachi do a Drive Fitness Test and Seagate something similar but I have not been able to get either to work on a BootCamp Windows partition.
I tried formatting in Disk Utility and pulling some data on and off. I'm now running a scan for bad blocks in Drive Genius (is this worth it? It's going to take about a week at this rate). Anything else I should do?
I have been reading about people taking a SSD drive for Boot and OS and using a second HD for their data using MCE's Optibay hard drive enclosure.
I would love to go this way but I can't justify spending all the cash on a SSD yet. Could I put in 2 500GB 7200 rpm drives and RAID 0 them? I know this wont be as fast as SSD but it should be faster than a single hard drive and hold a lot more storage for less $$$.
Does anyone know if it's possible to have two sets of striped drives using a single hardware RAID controller? I'm looking at the ARC-1210 and it seems like you can have more than one set of striped drives, but I'm not positive. My plan is to have two small SSDs set up for the boot drive and two HDDs for storage, each pair set up with RAID 0. Can this be accomplished using a single controller? Note: I'd just use OS X's software RAID but I need to keep the cores freed up for computation. I'm not concerned with redundancy--just speed.
i am considering running a Raid 0 configuration on my Powermac 2x300gb drives. Right now i have duplicated everything onto a 250gb drive and have successfully booted with this drive. Does anybody know what steps i need to talk to Raid the two 300gb drives and move everything back onto them?
I'm thinking about getting a Mac Pro tower from apple, and then buying two 500gb hard drives to place them in a raid 0 config. My question is, is setting up raid as easy as taking out the existing hard drive, placing both the new drives into the mac pro, and selecting raid 0 from OSX when I reinstall the operating system?? Or does the Mac have something similar to a Bios setup where I select that?
I just got a used mac pro quad. I plan to use it for video production- final cut pro, pics - aperture, and music production- protools. THe computer came with 3 - 10k rpm 160g hd's. Two of them are set up as a raid 0. I like the idea of having a faster drive as a boot drive, but 160 seems kind of small to me as the drive to run memory hungry apps and the operating system. Am I right? I could go to a 300g 10k rpm drive. I am also thinking about getting a bigger drive, say a 750g or 1 tb 7200 rpm. Should I use this as the boot drive or as a secondary storage drive?. If it's the boot drive should I add the other 160g 10k drive to the raid or keep it separate? I assume that neither way would be wrong, nor create a problem, but since I haven't put anything on it yet, I'm wondering what would be the most efficient way to manage my files and get the most out of my computer.
