[Audioeditor]

You probably have one I do but it's for Windows. The little case with 5 sata drives and one cable that goes to a PCIe adapter?

I'm now trying to do that with my new MacPro and I can't find anything in the shrimpy little User's Guide. There's no listing for Raid.

The instructions on the driver CD show some screen shots from Mac installing their driver but the screen shot shows the Mac showing this raid as JBOD. The instructions said in OSX 10.4 you could have it as a raid 0 or as JBOD. I of course want Raid 0 but I don't know where you get to make that choice--Mac or the driver software somehow.

Do you need to bother with the OS drive utilities at all? I know you have to do practically the whole procedure in the Windows OS, but maybe Mac is easier.

If anyone has done this, I'd sure appreciate some help. I have an 8-core and running 10.49.

Thanks

[OreoCookie]

First of all you need to tell us what kind of enclosure you have. We have no idea what software it is you're talking about.
The only sensible RAID level for you is RAID5! Don't use JBOD or RAID0! Just don't! If you create a RAID with MacOS, you won't be able to use it under Windows and vice versa! You've probably just bought `dumb' enclosures and have to do a software RAID. However, OS X' software RAID can't do RAID5, so you need a hardware RAID5 controller. The same is true for Windows XP, by the way, although there are hacks or third-party software to enable RAID5 functionality.

You may want to have a look here or a recent thread about storage solutions. However, let me repeat one more time: don't use either JBOD or RAID0 on 5 drives!

[Sherman Homan]

Just plain old Disk Utility, it is already in your Utilities Folder.
You can pay extra for SoftRaid, depending on what you need, it is excellent.
You sure you want a Level 0 RAID?!

(Oreo beat me to it, more passionately...!)

[Audioeditor]

I have a norcotek enclosure (DS-500e) with a PCIe sata card (NORCO-4627)and multiplier all sold together as a system. I have added five Seagate
500 meg ES drives and wanted a Raid0 for maximum throughput since I'll be editing HD on FCP. We have 2 SCSI raids for our Avid Symphonies that have been running for over 4 years as raid0 so perhaps we've been lucky. It looked like, from the driver that came with this new system, that with OSX4.xx, Jbod and Raid0 were the only choices. They showed more choices for Windows and even with OSX 3.xx. What can I do to get the highest throughput?

[OreoCookie]

If you have a 5 % failure rate for an individual drive, the probability that your JBOD/RAID0 fails is almost 23 %. RAID0 will have the fastest throughput, but nevertheless, it is really not advisable to use that many disks in a RAID0.

I think you should spend some time thinking about a suitable configuration for your problem. Have a look at the link I've provided: I doubt you need 2.5 TB of fast disk space at the same time. Another member who is in the photography business configured a RAID0 of two drives (two Raptors, I believe) as a scratch disk for his work. The other drives are mostly for `storage' where speed is less of an issue. Furthermore, he has a backup strategy, so if his RAID0 fails, he might lose his work files, but none of his originals.

If you had consulted this forum before the purchase, I probably would have suggested a hardware RAID5 solution akin to a WiebeTech RT5 (which you can use under Windows and MacOS alike, it's completely transparent) or if you preferred a solution similar to the one I outlined above, I would have suggested you get two Raptors as scratch disks and several slower drives for storage.

[goMac]

That's odd. Your enclosure SEEMS to support hardware raid AND Raid 5, but it claims that Raid 5 only works under 10.3.9. WTF?

NM, It's not hardware raid.

If you look at reviews for it on Newegg it's probably not a very good choice:
Customer Reviews Of NORCO DS-500e 5 Bay eSATA RAID Hard Drive Storage Array - Retail