[pletopia]

i'm planning on getting a laptop for when i leave for school this coming fall however since i am leaving the country for my studies .. i have a big problem ... i will be leaving behind a very precious thing ... my 8 HD's (4x200GB raid5 & 4x300GB raid5) which are running in my linux server.

While i was sulking .. it came to my head .. would it not be possible to maybe get usb2 enclosures for the drives .. at least for a set of them (so 4 enclosures) and pop them into them and take them along. obviously it would work if they weren't raided .. but i'm anal about my data and i would prefer to use a raid level 5 (mirroring and stripping). under linux i use mdadm which fairly recently has gotten stable enough to be added to the kernel. Mac OS X doesn't have it .. but would it not be possible to dl the source which is availabe on the web and install it that way .. and then maybe use the md driver that comes with it to raid 4 usb2 hd's ??

any ideas if this might work .. should work .. will work ???

[bojangles]

I’m not familiar with mdadm personally, but I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to download and compile the source code on Mac OS X, just like any other *nix system.

Also, FWIW, external Firewire hard drives can definitely be RAIDed. Although Mac OS X’s Disk Utility doesn’t technically support RAID 5, it does treat Fw drives just like internals, so I would assume the same goes for USB drives.