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Internal Raid 0 on Mac Pro – backup program?
Having browsed these forums it seems to me that an internal raid on a Mac Pro (4.1 model, in my case) is an acceptable solution if you need Raid on a budget. I was thinking of a pretty simple setup where my boot drive (bay 1) would an SSD, followed by two 2TB drives (Bays 2 and 3, solid 7200rpm performers) in raid 0. Then I would like to backup the raid-0 to a 4TB drive in bay 4. Ideally this would be a daily (or 12 hour) automatic backup.
I would then further backup to external drives, less frequently, as well as move older projects on to external drives only, to make space on the raid for present day work.
My main concern now is how to implement the automatic backup? Should I just use Time Machine? I don’t feel like I need the versioned backup it offers (since all the individual programs have their own autosave vaults that I would be backing up separately to the cloud), and a complete mirror image of the raid seems “cleaner” to me somehow. Any suggestions?
And do any of you more seasoned people see something faulty with my line of thinking here?
PS: I do realize 4TB is a small capacity allotment, and I might eventually make a three drive raid 0, either 3x2TB or 3x3TB, and backup only to external drives (or toasted drives). But for now, I’d like to play it safe (3 backups) and relatively cheap.
Regards and thanks in advance, Einar Bjarni
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5 Replies
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why don’t you use a software RAID 10 in the Mac Pro?
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Hmm, yes, that might just be the ticket for me, but as the 2x2TB RAID and the 4TB drive are not exactly matching hardware, and would never have exactly the same capacities, would that cause a problem? I guess I could just partition them to match exactly (throw away a 1 or 2 Gigabytes at most)? But would everything slow down to the 5900rpm of the 4TB drive?
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I would use exact identical drives to do a raid. With an internal raid card you can do a Raid5 level array withina mac. The problem with internal raids is the temerature in the mac. The mac gets hot and after 3 years of professional use the raid goes bad.
I wouldn’t recommend an internal raid at all and I wouldn’t use a raid0 array.cheers
Rainer
factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems -
This could work, but you’re forgetting to backup your SSD.
On my system, I have Time Machine backing up the boot SSD. I also do a daily clone of the SSD so I have something to boot from if the SSD fails (Carbon Copy Cloner). I have all 4 bays of my Mac Pro in a software RAID0 that’s 8TB. I then back this up daily to an external 4TB drive. Since it’s only 4TB, it forces me to keep the internal RAID less than half full, which keeps it fast. I then archive my projects to bare hard drives and LTO tapes (BRU PE). Multiple copies of everything. I use FileFinder at home and NeoFinder at work to search the bare drives and LTO tapes. They’re basically the same app, but NeoFinder allows the database to sit on a server and have multiple instances of the app on different computers searching the centralized database.
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
I use Time Machine to backup my SSD system drive alone. I then use GetBackup2 to synch the internal 2x2Tb raid0 onto an external 4Tb drive daily, I archive and copy all media on an external safe NAS, so the mirror comes handy in case I need to save a delivery on a dead end if the RAID fails, or if I need to go on with my work on my laptop at home, but is not an archive set. An internal SW RAID10 array could be a good solution, but I prefer to have the sync’ed drive resting quiet most of the time instead of spinning inside the MAC.
Fabrizio D’Agnano
Rome, Italy
early 2008 MacPro, BM Intensity Pro, early 2008 iMac, 2011 MacBook Pro, FCP7, FCPX, OSX 10.8.3
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