[pra9ab0y]

I need a raid but am lost on how I am going to set it up.

Does anyone have any tips or things I should/look out for when setting it up.

All I know is I need a drive where I can store all of my RAW Camera files, post process and after the editing/completion of a job. Then I want it to mirror to a drive for the backup. Then maybe in the future if it becomes cost effective and I can build into my quotes some form of hotswap so I can store a weekly backup offsite.

Any ideas?

[NeverTriedApple]

I answered your post in another thread. Basically all you need is the following:

1. If you have Airport Extreme and don't use it's USB port on the back, get yourself RAID-1 USB storage (stay away from IOMEGA***) and use it for your library. Point your software in both Macbook and Desktop to its new location.

2. If you don't have Airport Extreme, get a RAID-1 storage with network interface and hook it to your existing router. Then point your software in both Macbook and Desktop to its new location.

*** - IOMEGA UK has crappiest after sales support ever. One has to dispatch faulty item to the Netherlands for inspection/replacement as IOMEGA don't operate UK support facility.

Pls also note that USB and Network interfaces are relatively slow so you might want to go make yourself a cup of coffee when syncing your files between laptop/desktop and library. Firewire 800 is better option but since you were thinking about Mac Mini as a hosting solution it would still have required network file transfer.


EDIT: In either case make sure you tell Time Machine to include library new location in it's regular backup.

[pra9ab0y]

Originally Posted by NeverTriedApple 

I answered your post in another thread. Basically all you need is the following:

1. If you have Airport Extreme and don't use it's USB port on the back, get yourself RAID-1 USB storage (stay away from IOMEGA***) and use it for your library. Point your software in both Macbook and Desktop to its new location.

2. If you don't have Airport Extreme, get a RAID-1 storage with network interface and hook it to your existing router. Then point your software in both Macbook and Desktop to its new location.

*** - IOMEGA UK has crappiest after sales support ever. One has to dispatch faulty item to the Netherlands for inspection/replacement as IOMEGA don't operate UK support facility.

Pls also note that USB and Network interfaces are relatively slow so you might want to go make yourself a cup of coffee when syncing your files between laptop/desktop and library. Firewire 800 is better option but since you were thinking about Mac Mini as a hosting solution it would still have required network file transfer.


EDIT: In either case make sure you tell Time Machine to include library new location in it's regular backup.

I don't want to use time machine. I just want the fastest way for things to work. And I think having the macbook pro added to the mix is a bad idea. Maybe I should just not use it for aperture at all?

[olePigeon]

I can't find the specific brand now, but what I did was just jump onto NewEgg, looked for a 2 TB drive that has mirror hardware RAID, found the cheapest one relative to positive reviews, then bought it.

Right now my server backs up student and faculty data to the new drives. It's two 1TB drives set up via mirror RAID with a flick of a button on the back of the drive unit. 1 drive automatically mirrors the other drive so I have a backup in addition to our offsite backup.

[besson3c]

olePigeon: the problem is, what happens when you hypothetically fill up your drive?

If you are looking for a growable amount of storage, RAID 1 might not be the best option. I don't know whether the proprietary RAID system used by Drobo is any good, but this product might warrant research:

Data Robotics, Inc.

[pra9ab0y]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

olePigeon: the problem is, what happens when you hypothetically fill up your drive?

If you are looking for a growable amount of storage, RAID 1 might not be the best option. I don't know whether the proprietary RAID system used by Drobo is any good, but this product might warrant research:

Data Robotics, Inc.

I looked at drobo, but cant see how it would work. From what I could tell it stored data across multiple drives which I dont want - correct me if im wrong. I want 1 drive mirrored to another. and if possible a hot swap facility. If I was to fill it up. In theory I would just buy another setup and move things around between the 2 to make space.

[steve626]

Originally Posted by NeverTriedApple 

*** - IOMEGA UK has crappiest after sales support ever. One has to dispatch faulty item to the Netherlands for inspection/replacement as IOMEGA don't operate UK support facility.

Well hold on there, I thought UK, Netherlands etc. ... it's all like one big happy unified country now, isn't it?

Seriously, though, Netherlands is not that far from the UK. I'm in California USA and when I had to return something to Amazon it went to somewhere in New York (~ 3000 km away) and before I even had time to seal up the box and send it, the replacement item had already arrived (2 days). Why would you care about it going to NEtherlands (vs. UK), does that cause delays?

[NeverTriedApple]

Originally Posted by steve626 

Well hold on there, I thought UK, Netherlands etc. ... it's all like one big happy unified country now, isn't it?

Seriously, though, Netherlands is not that far from the UK. I'm in California USA and when I had to return something to Amazon it went to somewhere in New York (~ 3000 km away) and before I even had time to seal up the box and send it, the replacement item had already arrived (2 days). Why would you care about it going to NEtherlands (vs. UK), does that cause delays?

You missed the point. Unlike Amazon, IOMEGA don't pay for return even with RMA issued. And couriers charge a hell lot more for international shipments than domestic. Me, I just popped back to Apple store I bought it from a year ago and had it replaced in store. Others may not be so lucky. So I stand corrected - stay away from IOMEGA UK.

[NeverTriedApple]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

olePigeon: the problem is, what happens when you hypothetically fill up your drive?

If you are looking for a growable amount of storage, RAID 1 might not be the best option.[/url]

Redundancy vs Disk Space? I choose former as latter is ridiculously cheap.

[pra9ab0y]

Originally Posted by NeverTriedApple 

Redundancy vs Disk Space? I choose former as latter is ridiculously cheap.

And if you don't have redundancy in a business environment your screwed if someone comes back asking for something and you didn't have it backed up when your drive/s failed.

Redundancy is the key to this thread. Having everything in 2 places if not 3 at all times.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by pra9ab0y 

I looked at drobo, but cant see how it would work. From what I could tell it stored data across multiple drives which I dont want - correct me if im wrong. I want 1 drive mirrored to another. and if possible a hot swap facility. If I was to fill it up. In theory I would just buy another setup and move things around between the 2 to make space.

A Raid 5+ setup doesn't just copy all of that stuff to multiple disks, it also gives you more storage capacity. The more disks you add, the more disk space you'll have, thus you can grow your capacity as desired.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by NeverTriedApple 

Redundancy vs Disk Space? I choose former as latter is ridiculously cheap.

Why is this decision a case of either/or? How does a RAID 5+ setup not give you both?

[besson3c]

When I say "Raid 5+" I mean Raid 5 through 10... I should probably say 5-10 rather than + though, sorry if that is confusing.

[pra9ab0y]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

When I say "Raid 5+" I mean Raid 5 through 10... I should probably say 5-10 rather than + though, sorry if that is confusing.

Could you explain how the drobo works then? Cos their website wasn't clear for me.

[shifuimam]

It looks like the Drobo uses RAID 6, which is an extension of RAID 5.

RAID 5 requires a minimum of three identical disks. The storage space in disks 1 and 2 is combined to provide the total amount of available storage. Data is spread across all three disks, and the remaining capacity is used for the parity bit, which is a piece of data the RAID uses that allows your data to be reconstructed if one of the disks fails.

RAID 6 uses an extra disk for a second parity bit, to provide further redundancy.

[besson3c]

What Shif said, except with the Drobo the disks don't need to be of identical size. However, the capacity is limited to the smallest size disk, and with RAID 6 you need a minimum of 4 drives (RAID 5 requires 3). Your space is the size of the smallest disk multiplied by the total number of disks - 2.

This might be different for the Drobo, I'm just citing the standard RAID 6 specs as listed here: RAID - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. I haven't researched the Drobo extensively, I don't know if it is a reliable product, but this might be the sort of thing that would be a good fit for somebody who needs a lot of cheap storage.

[pra9ab0y]

hmmm! I'm setting up sample folder structure as I type this. Trying to sort my data as to what i want saved and where. THen once thats done I think ill post it so people can see what im thinking.

[shifuimam]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

What Shif said, except with the Drobo the disks don't need to be of identical size. However, the capacity is limited to the smallest size disk, and with RAID 6 you need a minimum of 4 drives (RAID 5 requires 3). Your space is the size of the smallest disk multiplied by the total number of disks - 2.

Well, the same can be said for a RAID 5 that's not in a Drobo. It's just that it doesn't make much sense to NOT use three identical hard drives, unless you're using random drives you have laying around.

[besson3c]

Good point!

[HenryMelton]

To the original poster, my wife is a nature photographer and we've been fighting the HD capacity problems for several years. Back in 2006'ish, I convinced her to run mirrored disks, but it wasn't real Raid 1, just manually duplicating everything (with a pair of DVD's burned for backup as well), but since the mirroring wasn't automatic, she'd get in the habit of going back to one of the mirrored drives and working her photoshop magic there, but not keeping the updates duplicated. My one attempt to run a real RAID 1 on firewire drives using the Mac's built-in software was less than successful due to wife's curse of the semi-alive cables that were constantly tangled and unreliable.

Next step, I purchased a Buffalo TeraStation with 4 500 drives that provided a RAID 5 solution over the home network. From the start, it was unsuccessful for her workflow because even with gigabit ethernet, she wasn't getting the speed she needed to browse her photo library via Bridge. It became a side repository for photos that were less used.

Next, as the numbers of drives became unmanageable, we went with a Drobo. With a FW800 connection, she was immediately happy and began the process of moving her substantial library of photos over to it. I began buying 1.5T drives to increase the capacity in her 4 drive Drobo until it was clear that we would need more. There are 2T drives out there, but the cost per GB is still too high to use them. Drobo uses RAID-like technology, but with their own easy to use software. To add more capacity, just remove a drive and put a bigger drive in its place. The Drobo Desktop software gives you hints and warnings. If it's green, everything is fine. If yellow, it needs more capacity but still works and still protects files against a HD failure. If red, you're in danger if a HD failure occurs. When we unplugged a drive (hot swap) it went from yellow to red but still allowed her to use her files normally and then spent some hours integrating the new drive into the set, at which time it went back to green.

This month, I purchased the 8-drive DroboPro and moved the four drives as a set to the new box (and after a moment's panic when I had inserted the drives upside down and it couldn't recognize them) it came up with the library running fine in its new home. I plugged in a couple of 1T's and a couple of 500G's to fill out the slots and it made more capacity. Mary Ann promptly began moving still more of her library from individual drives to the new redundant storage. I can see that we'll need more 1.5T drives soon and I can use the smaller ones in the old Drobo chassis for an on-the-road Drobo for our frequent road trips.

Last night, about midnight, Mary Ann had connected the last one of her old 2006 drives and started a copy session that would have completed her move of photo libraries to the new Drobo Pro overnight. Just then, one of those sneaky, vile, cables wrapped itself around her leg and as she got up from her desk, the 2006 HD went sailing across the room, still blindly copying files, until it slammed hard on the ground and began making *horrible* sounds.

I was called in and spent an hour removing the Seagate drive from its chassis and confirming that it wasn't a fan making that noise, but it was indeed the spindle inside the drive. She wasn't going to be getting any of those photo file back. Luckily, this was one of those 'manual' mirrors we had started back then, so it appears that almost everything was available from other sources, so the trauma is reduced. But still, we're looking to see what kind of off-site storage we can come up with to protect nearly 10T of photo files.

[mduell]

pra9ab0y: How much storage space do you need? You probably don't want mirroring for an off site backup.


This is my RAID. There are many like it but this one is mine.

Code:
Unit  UnitType  Status         %RCmpl  %V/I/M  Stripe  Size(GB)  Cache  AVrfy
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
u0    RAID-10   OK             -       -       256K    10244.4   ON     OFF    
u1    SPARE     OK             -       -       -       931.505   -      OFF

[pra9ab0y]

Thanks for the post HenryMelton, I don't have nearly as many files as that but it gives a good insight as to how other people work.

Ideally I wanted about 1TB mirrored to begin with. Then as storage prices come down I will upgrade when necessary.

As it is now I am looking for 1TB for the actual files. This will house Original Raw files, the Aperture Library & an Aperture Vault, the final picks exported to folders, as well as resources like my logo templates and watermark files, all of which is mirrored to a 2nd 1TB drive. I can see this filling up very quickly but it will do until I can afford to pay someone to build a proper Raid for me.

Then I was planning to buy another independent drive to use a dedicated Aperture vault that I can update once a week and store offsite just in case my house burns down or gets burgled.

I was in the Apple store and they said that Snow Leopard allows you to have actual RAID setup from Disk Utility. Thinking of going that route for now as I need something that works and soon, mainly for the "just in case" factor. Better safe than sorry!!

[larkost]

There is a generic problem here: RAID is not a backup system.

RAID 1 (and others) is all about keeping a system operating even though one (or more) dives have failed. This is not the same thing as a backup at all because it does not save someone from any other problem other than disk (hardware) failure. If you delete a file, then it has been deleted on all mirrors in any form of RAID. So it cannot be considered a backup. And unless you need either real speed from backup (sometimes needed when taking data from multiple sources), or are using RAID to glue together a really big disk, RAID mirroring really has no place in a backup solution. Instead it is used when you need to have a solution that will not fall down in the face of a hardware failure.

This is not what the original poster seems to want to do. The problem here is that the original poster came out and talked about RAID, and even said that is what he needed, but that is not the case.

Rather it sounds like the poster needs a good disk, and a reliable way of backing up that disk to a second disk, so that second disk can be taken off-site for a real backup. So... can we start this again?

[pra9ab0y]

Originally Posted by larkost 

There is a generic problem here: RAID is not a backup system.

RAID 1 (and others) is all about keeping a system operating even though one (or more) dives have failed. This is not the same thing as a backup at all because it does not save someone from any other problem other than disk (hardware) failure. If you delete a file, then it has been deleted on all mirrors in any form of RAID. So it cannot be considered a backup. And unless you need either real speed from backup (sometimes needed when taking data from multiple sources), or are using RAID to glue together a really big disk, RAID mirroring really has no place in a backup solution. Instead it is used when you need to have a solution that will not fall down in the face of a hardware failure.

This is not what the original poster seems to want to do. The problem here is that the original poster came out and talked about RAID, and even said that is what he needed, but that is not the case.

Rather it sounds like the poster needs a good disk, and a reliable way of backing up that disk to a second disk, so that second disk can be taken off-site for a real backup. So... can we start this again?

You've answered your own question really! All I want is a mirror of the first drive incase of hardware failure, the whole comment about speed isn't an issue. I dont want to glue some drives together yet. And about deleting a file that isn't really an issue. The only system that offers me the function to mirror a drive is raid. So unless you've got a better idea??

[mduell]

Mirroring is not a backup. It's good for high availability, but its bad for backups. Please, read the story.

The better idea is versioned backup (Time Machine, etc). You could use an array for your data drive and/or backup drive if you needed capacity not available in a single drive, but you don't.

[pra9ab0y]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Mirroring is not a backup. It's good for high availability, but its bad for backups. Please, read the story.

First off I don't see how the story applies to me. All I want is 1 drive, with an exact match on different hardware. Mainly because if 1 drive fails the other hopefully does not.

The better idea is versioned backup (Time Machine, etc). You could use an array for your data drive and/or backup drive if you needed capacity not available in a single drive, but you don't.

2nd. I don't want versioned back up. I dont like how time machine works mainly because I dont want to "go back in time". Like I said above. All i want is 1 drive, with an exact copy on a different drive.

[mduell]

The point was constantly breaking and rebuilding a mirror is a bad idea. Cloning is also a bad idea in case you have a drive failure during the cloning.

Even without the desire to go back in time, the versioned backup is a good idea because it means you always have at least one good backup. If your data drive is close to full and the backup drive is the same size, there won't be much history anyway.

[pra9ab0y]

Originally Posted by mduell 

The point was constantly breaking and rebuilding a mirror is a bad idea. Cloning is also a bad idea in case you have a drive failure during the cloning.

Even without the desire to go back in time, the versioned backup is a good idea because it means you always have at least one good backup. If your data drive is close to full and the backup drive is the same size, there won't be much history anyway.

Ok. so what do you suggest?

[besson3c]

Am I missing something? When did he say that he would be constantly breaking and rebuilding the mirror?

If it were me, I would do exactly as he wants to do - setup a software based RAID 1 mirror (which he can do via Disk Utility). If he wants to take snapshots or go portable, he can clone from his disk to a third drive. I would leave the 2 main drives constantly connected to each other.

The only time I wouldn't suggest such a thing is if somebody wants a storage system that they can grow over time. This is more or less a use-and-dispose sort of system, but then again, not an incredible amount is at stake given the cheap cost of drives.

[pra9ab0y]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Am I missing something? When did he say that he would be constantly breaking and rebuilding the mirror?

If it were me, I would do exactly as he wants to do - setup a software based RAID 1 mirror (which he can do via Disk Utility). If he wants to take snapshots or go portable, he can clone from his disk to a third drive. I would leave the 2 main drives constantly connected to each other.

The only time I wouldn't suggest such a thing is if somebody wants a storage system that they can grow over time. This is more or less a use-and-dispose sort of system, but then again, not an incredible amount is at stake given the cheap cost of drives.

Exactly, No idea what build or break the mirror means. I just want it to save my changes. I personally hate time machine and you actually sound like the guy on the store who literally backed me into a corner and blasted out time machine is the only way your going to sort this so go buy a time machine drive. Last time im going to say it - I DO NOT WANT TO USE TIME MACHINE. FULL STOP......

I wanted to leave the 2 drives constantly connected. Then have a 3rd which was 100% separate that wouldn't run a raid or anything fancy that would just have an Aperture vault saved on it. Then I have 3 copies of the files at all times.

[besson3c]

The third drive wouldn't ruin your RAID. The RAID configuration is very under-the-hood. To the operating system and to you and any software you have running on your computer, your drive will look just like any other. You don't have to worry about software compatibility with a RAID or anything like that, the mirroring is all happening at a very low level.

[mduell]

I misunderstood the above posts including both a mirror and an offsite drive to imply that half (or a third) of the mirror was going to be taken offsite (to break the array) and then occasionally brought back (to rebuild the array).

A RAID1 mirror plus a drive that is stored offsite and regularly cloned is a fine solution.

I think you can achieve a better solution (in terms of capability and robustness) with the same hardware (there's nothing special about a "time machine drive"), but you've rejected that for unstated reasons and that's your prerogative.

[pra9ab0y]

Any suggestions then?

[besson3c]

If that's directed at me, I'd just pick whatever two/three drives have gotten the best reviews on NewEgg at the size you want and go from there.

[pra9ab0y]

Sorted! Got it all done! Works well so far. Thanks for the advice it did help somewhat as to how I set it up!

I will post the whole workflow when I get over my bout of flu!