This is an FYI, following up to many things that I have read and posted all overfor the last couple of months.
I work in a medium sized design office and needed to set up a new, more secure and robust file server for backups and job archiving that could be available to people in a couple of locations. The last server I had, I had to do all of the server backups manually, what a drag. So I wanted to set up a RAID 0+1 internal. For security, I did not want an external solution. Plus the internal is cheaper.
After looking all over hill and dale, I found a solution that I was very hopeful would work. No one makes an ATA hardware RAID except in RAID 0. Bummer. I then discovered that OS X 10.1 Server now came with a software RAID in the new Disk Utility. So, I emailed the ACARD company, since they made the ATA/133 RAID 0 card that I wanted to buy. Well, they made my day when they told me this: You can make a RAID 0+1 in OS X Server by using 4 drives, set them to hardware 0 (stripping) then use the RAID utility in OS X Server to mirror.
It works and works great! No problems so far. The array setup has even survived two system re-installs (unrealated to RAID). No need to reset and all data intact. Superfast and plus totally redundent data protection. Only complaint is no notification if a drive fails other than no data available.
If anyone wants to do this kind of thing, it works great. Set up is as follows:
- G4/533/640mb ram
- Stock 40gb HD mounted on top pf CD casing on old plastic sled, much velcro holding it on (like Proline kit), using original IDE bus for the original position, just got a longer ribbon.
- Four 80gb drives mounted in the bottom trays.
- ACARD ATA/133 RAID card
- the four drives are hardware stripped into two 150gb volumes
- OS X 10.1 Sever disk utility mirrors those drives into one 150gb redundent set.
- Set to share to the workgroup via Appletalk.
Now, if someone would make an actual hardware solution for this. The software RAID is still a little scary. I keep a FireWire HD backup offsite just for safe keeping. Hope this is beneficial to people!
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