[hukalaki]

I currently have an upgraded AGP 350 G4 tower, now with a 1.2 GHz processor, 1.75 gigs ram and two internal 300 meg SATA drives in a mirror raid as well as another internal drive and an external firewire drive, both for cloned backups. This is a business computer and I need the redundancy to ensure data security.

However, at this point I would like to get another machine--although the G4 is fine for the usual stuff such as web, word processing and finance, it is too slow for video editing, and I'd like to use the new computer for my business needs too.

I have been looking at the Pros for the SATA drive bays and setting up a mirror raid with an internal backup with an external firewire backup as I currently have. However, ease of setting up the drives is really the only reason why I would need one.

So my question is whether I can use these SATA drives on an external RAID array with the iMac or mac mini, and if so , would the cost of the enclosures etc bump up the price of the iMac closer to that of the Pro? Finally, does something like this make sense or would it be better to have an integrated solution?

[mduell]

Yes, you could do that all with an iMac for much less than the price of a Mac Pro. I'd recommend the iMac over the Mac mini due to (if nothing else) the hard drive size and speed.

But I think it may be worth rethinking your disk strategy. RAID1 is about availability, not reliability; it's great for servers where you can't tolerate 5 seconds of downtime, but I don't think it's really the most effective solution for what you want. Outside of 24/7 server environments, when do disks dies? Startup, so the idea that I need another disk spinning along all the time just in case one dies is worrying about the wrong things.

I'd use the internal drive as your day-to-day 'operating' disk. Throw the 300GB drives in USB enclosures* and alternate between them (switching either daily or weekly) for nightly clones (storing the unused one in a fire safe or similar). If the internal disk ever dies, just boot off the external disk for immediate usability or open up the machine and put it inside for longer term usage (would require an Apple certified tech if you care about your warranty). Use the final disk as a versioned backup (with Time Machine in Leopard, or some other scheme in Tiger) so you can get files the way they were a month or three ago instead of just the way they were yesterday or the day before on your clone disks (a 'true' backup).

* Before everyone jumps on me with "oh but Firewire is so much faster than USB", consider a few things: SATA<->FW enclosures are 3 times the price of SATA<->USB enclosures, he has all night to backup (300GB on USB2 should only take about 4 hours), and the iMac/Mac mini only have 2 or 1 Firewire ports, respectively.

[tv5847]

I am sorry to butt in on you here, but I do now know where to start a new thread.

I am looking for a Service Manual for an eMac 1.25 GHZ. I read in a post on July 25, 2007 a place to look, but there was no such place. My hard drive went out and I want to put another in it.

My email is: tv5847@yahoo.com


Thanks