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To Raid or Not to Raid?
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Junior Member
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: CA
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OK,
I just got a G5 i have the standard 160gb drive in the dual 2 gig system. So I am hoping the ever learned scholars and mac geniuses of the board can share the wisdom and guide me on my use of hard discs. I will be getting 2 - 250 gb drives probably western digital, my questio is how much better perforamnce do i get out of using them in a raid configuration striped I guess you would call it to create one 250gb drive out of the two.
I mainly use the machine for web and photoshop tasks and of course now that i can do it once again will be playing some of the newer games out.
Thanks in advance.
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"It's nice to be important but it's more important to be nice!"
15"/1ghz Ti/1gb/powerbook Panther
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Mac Pro Dual 3.0 10gb Ram 2TB discs with ATI 1900xt
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iMac Grape 333 256Ram 6gb
iSight, iPod Video 80 gb
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: Boston
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If your looking to stripe your system drive, then I'd advice against it. The speen benefit does not out way the risk. Basically if one of the drives burps or has a problem you have lost your system drive, your user area and data.
As you know Raid-0 or stripping splits the data and writes it to two different drives at the same time thus reducing the disk access bottleneck, the down side is if either drive has a problem well, as I said...
Your machine is a speed demon as it is, and if your doing just some photoshop and web why do you want to setup a raid-0 system?
Mike
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Admin Emeritus  Join Date: Oct 1999
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
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"RAID" 0 is not true RAID -- the "R" stands for "redundant", which "RAID" 0 is anything but! Maflynn is absolutely correct that using a "RAID" 0 puts your data at risk.
If you really want RAID, then get an external RAID enclosure that does real RAID (e.g. RAID 5). RAID 5 gives you speed and redundancy -- any one of the drives in the array can fail with no data loss.
tooki
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Mac Elite
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Vancouver
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G5s can boot off a sofware RAID now, right?
In that case, if you didn't want to spend anymore money but had the time to move the data around (assuming you had an external enclosure for the 160 and also that you were willing to give up 250GB of space), you could set yourself up in RAID-1 (mirrored) which would provide you with at least some layer of data security against hardware failure.
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: South of the Mason-Dixon line
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Just stopping by to provide my standard-issue opinion that drive failure (or errors) is rare - and doubling the chance of drive failure still leaves you with an insignificant risk, in my opinion.
Besides, unless you were planning to use that 2nd hard drive as backup storage of your primary drive - you weren't going to have any freakin' redundancy anyway. Ain't as if you 'give up' anything by striping the 2 disks. Except the ability to use one as a backup drive - and you didn't buy it for that purpose, right?
Yes, it'll haul ass if you set it up as a 'software-striped' array. Just backup your files as you normally would (or did) and enjoy the free speed.
edit: Try it out and see if it's reliable. Maybe do more frequent backups until you know for sure.
I now return you to the advice of more cautious minds....
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Last edited by Spliffdaddy; Sep 20, 2004 at 11:59 AM.
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Junior Member
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: CA
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Thanks for the insight, but it now brings up another question. How to reliably back it up. say i get an enclosure for the 160 in there currently and then i create a restore image of the raid should i set it up, will it be a reliable restore? which software do i use for this, apple's disk util? Or other? advice please.
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"It's nice to be important but it's more important to be nice!"
15"/1ghz Ti/1gb/powerbook Panther
----------------------
Mac Pro Dual 3.0 10gb Ram 2TB discs with ATI 1900xt
----------------------
iMac Grape 333 256Ram 6gb
iSight, iPod Video 80 gb
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: NY, NY
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I found this site to be useful when I was setting up my new DP 2.5 G5 as a dedicated Photoshop machine:
MacGurus
No affiliation, just a happy customer.
Enjoy your new machine. Oh, and you may want to wait until the last minute until you buy your new drive, prices may drop in the interim.
JT
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Quad 2.5 Ghz G5 7GB RAM + 7800GT
15" MBP 2.16 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 100 GB 7200 RPM HDD
G4 DA 1.2 Ghz 1.5 GB RAM + 4 HDD (fileserver)
G4 Cube 800MHz , Radeon 7000, 1.5 GB RAM
<not bad for a relatively new switcher...>
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