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gperks · Apr 13, 2007, 09:42 PM

I thinking of upgrading my wife's computer.

She does a bunch of Photoshop and Pages work, and has tens of thousands of photos in iPhoto.

The photos are precious, so I'd like some redundancy and backup.

I was comparing a Mac Pro (+23" LCD), with three drives – two mirrored, one for weekly backups – with an iMac 24". The iMac is considerably less expensive, burns less electricity; but then I'd have to add some sort of external drive setup which would make up some of the price difference. And I've no idea what sort of external setup to go with!

If I go with RAID-1 in the Mac Pro, is it still bootable if one of the drives dies?

Any suggestions for an iMac configuration?

Mac Write · Apr 14, 2007, 02:42 AM

RAID5 is more reliable IMO. Use an old Mac and set it up with RAID5 (3+ drives)/ One drive dies take like 24hrs I hear when you pop in a new one to rebuild it. 3x500GB drives become a 1TB drive with redundancy.

G5man · Apr 14, 2007, 03:54 AM

First off, RAID 5 if you have 3 drives you can back up one of the two but not both onto one. I would plan on going on newegg if you get a Mac Pro and get two 1 TB drives and use apple's raid utility and raid 1 them.

ninahagen · Apr 14, 2007, 05:42 AM

I am not certain this will work, but RAID 0 treats all the drives in the array as one drive. I believe you could run the two drives in RAID 0 (the speediest) and mirror them as one drive to another backup disc (for safety). Does anybody know if this is possible in practice?

If this will work, you will want to use a 10k rpm HDs (150GB, from Western Digital) for the RAID array. I would use three...and save the fourth bay for a larger 7200 rpm HD.

mduell · Apr 14, 2007, 09:07 AM

I'd go with the iMac... adding an external 500GB drive is $150-200.

I don't think RAID1 makes sense for your wife's workstation. When you're in an uptime-critical environment (like a server) and being down for a few minutes/hours can cost $$$$$, it makes sense. But hard drives don't die that often, and if the internal hard drive died would it really cost tens of thousands for her to not be productive for an afternoon?

You could even clone the internal iMac drive to the external drive (on a nightly basis or similar), and then if the internal drive died she could keep working within minutes by booting off the external drive.

gperks · Apr 14, 2007, 09:58 AM

Thanks everyone, really good advice.

Mark, I think you're right about the iMac & external drive. That's basically what we're doing today using SuperDuper (currently two internal drives in a Power Mac G5).

I was leaning towards RAID-1 because if a drive dies, we lose a bunch of photos taken since the last backup. Sometimes SuperDuper farts and fails to backup on schedule. Then I'm dead meat when we find birthday or Christmas photos gone.

RAID-1 isn't feasible with an iMac, is it?

mduell · Apr 14, 2007, 10:40 AM

You might be able to do software RAID1 on the iMac with the internal drive and an external drive, but that doesn't make it a good idea.

I'd switch to something more reliable than SuperDuper and only delete photos off your camera after you know a backup has completed; with the size/price of memory cards these days (I saw 2GB for $10 last week), it shouldn't be a big deal.

OreoCookie · Apr 14, 2007, 02:05 PM

First of all, a RAID is not a backup! Also, if she has that many pictures, software like Aperture will make backups really easy: buy one (or several) external harddrives and voila (if it's only the pictures you're worried about).

In addition to that, she'd have a much better photo cataloging software than what she is working with now. However, in addition to that, she should get a backup solution (do a search in the Applications forum, it's a frequently-covered topic).

hangarbum · Apr 23, 2007, 02:30 AM

sort of along the same lines; i'm about to move and trying to keep my job, i'm thinking of buying a mac pro and set up a raid5. i was going to go with three 500gb wd drives and a highpoint controller, but every one i see says it isn't compatible with the mac pro internal sata bays. i'm doing video editing and would hate to lose any for a drive failure, but i don't want to have to buy new hardware to put inside new hardware to get this going. also, it seems like the consensus is that apple's coming out with a new form factor for the mac pro soon, so maybe this won't even be an issue in two months, but it's all speculation at this point. getting tired of

.

mac128k-1984 · 08:18 AM

Originally Posted by gperks

She does a bunch of Photoshop and Pages work, and has tens of thousands of photos in iPhoto.
...
The photos are precious, so I'd like some redundancy and backup.

I think going with a RAID 1 setup will help with your need for redundancy but a good backup strategy is a must especially with as many photos that you have which have a high sentimental value.

That being the case I'd go with a RAID 1, supplimented with an external drive and finally using back up software back the images up to dvd and bring them off site.

This may sound excessive but think about it, if you main drive craps out the second drive of raid 1 could come in handy or the external drive. But what happens if the computer is stolen, or a power spike fries your whole setup. Having a set of backups away from our house will increase your odds of keeping your files.

I opted not to go the RAID1 route but rather just backup my files to an external drive and do the dvd thing. I just finished backing up my aperture library yesterday, took a little while but its worth it.

mduell · Apr 23, 2007, 09:12 AM

Originally Posted by hangarbum

sort of along the same lines; i'm about to move and trying to keep my job, i'm thinking of buying a mac pro and set up a raid5. i was going to go with three 500gb wd drives and a highpoint controller, but every one i see says it isn't compatible with the mac pro internal sata bays. i'm doing video editing and would hate to lose any for a drive failure, but i don't want to have to buy new hardware to put inside new hardware to get this going. also, it seems like the consensus is that apple's coming out with a new form factor for the mac pro soon, so maybe this won't even be an issue in two months, but it's all speculation at this point. getting tired of

.

OS X can do software RAID. The usual software RAID downsides apply, but it's available and relatively painless.

cgc · Apr 23, 2007, 09:59 AM

I was looking into a mirror RAID on my MacPro and was told in a thread here on MacNN that Apple's Firmware updates may have trouble using a RAID.

Have you looked into an external solution such as a NAS or Firewire drive?

Madrag · Apr 23, 2007, 10:18 AM

I use Deja-Vue and the schedulled backups never failed... I recommend it.
Look into the Applications forum as suggested

mac128k-1984 · Apr 23, 2007, 01:17 PM

Originally Posted by cgc

I was looking into a mirror RAID on my MacPro and was told in a thread here on MacNN that Apple's Firmware updates may have trouble using a RAID.

Prior firmware updates would not work if you booted off a raid-0 volume. I cannot speak if the same is true if RAID-1 but I know first hand that that last set of firmware updates would not work. Will future one's work - who knows

cgc · Apr 23, 2007, 05:22 PM

Originally Posted by mac128k-1984

Prior firmware updates would not work if you booted off a raid-0 volume. I cannot speak if the same is true if RAID-1 but I know first hand that that last set of firmware updates would not work. Will future one's work - who knows

Can you boot off CD and apply firmware updates? (I suspect not).

mac128k-1984 · Apr 23, 2007, 07:55 PM

Nope, the only way you can is off a non-raided drive.

Since most people typically are not willing to incur a performance penalty for going to a RAID-1 setup (software RAID at that) I cannot really say if that will work. The only way I could do it was by having seperate drive that had OSX loaded onto it.

This was a blessing in disguise because you cannot load bootcamp onto a raided drive either (I'm not just talking about windows xp but bootcamp itself.)

cgc · Apr 23, 2007, 08:13 PM

That sucks. Maybe I'll get a RAID 5 NAS or wait until 10,000 RPM drives reach 250GB.

mac128k-1984 · Apr 23, 2007, 09:14 PM

Originally Posted by cgc

That sucks. Maybe I'll get a RAID 5 NAS or wait until 10,000 RPM drives reach 250GB.

That's ok, for me and my needs, I really didn't require raid-0. The risk was more then what I was willing to accept (even though I backed up every night).

I have read enough threads of people who got into deep weeds because something burped on their raid-0 drive. I wasn't willing to risk losing my photos or at the very least a couple of days worth of work rebuilding it setup from a backup.

ginoledesma · Apr 24, 2007, 03:45 AM

I got a D-Link DNS-323 2-drive NAS. I've configured it to use 2x500GB drives in RAID-1 fashion. I use it mostly to store all my documents and access it remotely over the network and Internet. RAID-1 may be over-kill for day-to-day use in this case, but as I only back-up once a week, it saves me the hassle of downtime should the drive become unavailable (and I'm on the go most of the time). This is good enough for most things, but you'll be limited to network speeds (6-8MB/s on a 100Mbps network, 1-2MB/s on a WiFi/802.11g connection, or about 16-22MB/s on a 1000Mbps network).

The D-Link can be had for about $180 these days, and the cost of 2x500GB drives will set you back another $250 or so. The more Mac-friendly ones are the Infrant ReadyNAS series, but they're a tad more expensive.

hangarbum · Apr 24, 2007, 05:33 AM

picked up a western digital drive today at costco for $369.99. one terabyte in one enclosure that is two 500 gig drives. it has usb2, fw400, and fw800. raid0 or raid1 ready to go. i can't believe how much the prices are dropping on these things. and i saw an ad over the weekend for a 4gb flash drive for $60. i remember not that long ago getting a 1gb external scsi drive for it seems like around $1000 for my old old old powerbook. now that i think about it, that was about a decade ago. time to stop rambling.