[Matthew Attoe]

Hi,

I currently have a G5 with two Seagate 750GB hard drives (one with 16MB Cache and one with 8MB cache if that makes any odds)installed as separate drives.

I'm thinking of reinstalling the OS and using the RAID option in Disk Utility to set-up the drives as RAID 0.

Now, I'm aware that if one of the drives dies ALL the data is gone. I have two external hard drives (a 250GB and a 500GB) that I use to backup my important data (music, photos, documents) and I actually backup on regular basis. No, really, I do!

But I was wondering how reliable the Apple RAID software is? Although I'm willing to take the risks along with the benefits of RAID 0, I don't want to deliberately put myself at risk if the Apple software isn't very stable or is known to be problematic.

Any advice or help that you can offer would be very gratefully received.

Many thanks in advance,

Matthew

[besson3c]

I don't think the software RAID provided by OS X belongs to Apple, but to the open source/BSD community. I haven't used RAID under OS X, but under FreeBSD I do RAID 1 and it works beautifully. I'd be surprised if people reported problems with striping.

You would be increasing your chances of losing data with a RAID 0 setup, but if losing a day's work would not be the end of the world for you (i.e. your backup runs daily), go for it. If a drive does go bad and your system won't boot, I would imagine that the fix would be booting off of something else and disabling RAID 0, but you might want to experiment with doing this beforehand to see whether this works as expected.

[mpancha]

I've heard a lot of positives about Apple's OS X builtin Raid (not really Apple's, but on your Apple is what I mean).

However, personally I never advise anyone to use a software raid solution. Hardware is always more reliable.

[pinenuts]

I have Raid 1 (mirror) running on my OS X Server. I used set it before I installed the OS. I hope it works in case of failure, but just in case I have a firewire drive attached and I use CCC to back up pretty regularly.

[besson3c]

The argument about what is more reliable is sort of misguided, IMHO.

If this data is valuable enough, you should have a redundant backup beyond your RAID anyway - there are absolutely no guarantees that a hardware RAID setup won't fail you either, this does happen. An off-site backup may be worth looking into in addition to your RAID setup.

If you can afford hardware RAID, you should, it does work better. However, that doesn't mean that you should be scared of software RAID - it is a legitimate and functioning means of backup, and if you need to save the bucks and don't mind the overhead, it is certainly better than having nothing (in the case of RAID 1 or RAID 5 in treating your RAID setup as a backup).

If you have a backup for your RAID 0 setup and don't mind the downsides and dangers of such a setup, again, software RAID 0 may be better than the alternative of having nothing.

Data that is important should have multiple layers of redundancy so that you never have to rely completely on one backup source. If you have multiple layers, it certainly doesn't hurt to add redundancies - no matter how flimsy they might be to rely upon solely.

[SSharon]

I have been using RAID 1 on my MDD with 2 200gb drives for a few months now with no problems. At first I noticed that the question mark would appear once during boot but then it would proceed properly. Also in the beginning one drive wouldn't mount properly, but I was happy to see that the computer would still boot off the second drive properly.