[NewOldbie]

Looks like I'm going to be buying another external hard drive. My SCSI internal drive took a crap and I'm running an external FW400 (LaCie 250GB) as my primary drive.

Is it a terrible waste to buy another 250 GB drive and try to make it a RAID system? Can I do that? Are there advantages? (My memory of RAID systems are they were best with several identical SCSI drives). What are my alternatives?

This will be plugged into an AGP 450 G4. Used sometimes on my 17" (I know, time to move to the G5). When I go to the G5 I'd like upward compatibility too.

Appreciate your comments.

[ozymandismotard]

'A national lottery is a tax on stupidity' Voltaire

[scottiB]

See here:

http://www.barefeats.com/fire33.html

While you surely can do it by adding another 250GB Lacie drive, to get maximum throughput, you'd need to add a PCI FireWire card for dual channels. This presents a problem with using a PowerBook, unless you also use a FW PC card in its slot for the second channel.

In migrating to a G5, you could use the PCI card in that, too.


http://www.iogear.com/products/product.php?Item=GPF103
http://www.miglia.com/products/expan...400/index.html
http://www.miglia.com/products/expan...800/index.html

[OreoCookie]

But you could connect that drive internally as well and make a RAID.

[Sam Venning]

Firewire 800 RAIDs - Warning! Warning! Warning!

I had big problems with a Firewire 800 RAID. I think there are big problems with Firewire 800... I'm just not sure if it is a hardware or software problem. Drives on the Firewire 800 bus seem to unexpectedly drop off the bus.

I detail my eperience here: http://samv.customer.netspace.net.au/fwproblem/ I ended up ditching Firwire 800 and put the drives in my PowerMac G4 Dual 1GHz. I'm using RAID for Final Cut Pro editing - I don't trust Firewire 800 yet.

Mac OS 10.3.3 update *might* fix this.