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Mac Pro internal RAID – any problems?
Has anybody had experience good or bad using an internal RAID set up with Disk Utility rather than an external hardware based RAID?
I need more space and I’m thinking of adding 3 2TB drives to my Mac Pro and using my Drobo RAID as a backup for them, but I’ve heard some reports that software RAID like this is flakey. I realise that as the internal RAID will be RAID 0 if one of the 3 drives goes down I lose all data but with a backup on the Drobo I think I can live with that.
Any thoughts out there?
Thanks
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4 Replies
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Sounds like a good way to go, as long as you are really doing your backups. Performance should be great. We used software RAIDs for some time and they performed well, until we decided to go to hardware RAID5 and RAID6 systems for safety reasons.
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Thanks Floh
I have a g-tech eS external RAID 5 but I’ve found that disk reliability is not the real danger (enterprise drives at least are now really reliable) but problems with the RAID hardware/firmware. With the G-tech I suddenly could not write to the RAID although I could read, so I looked for another solution like the Drobo but this is better suited to backup than editing.
I will do my backups every day promise 🙂
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[Andy Taplin] “but I’ve found that disk reliability is not the real danger (enterprise drives at least are now really reliable)”
That´s what I thought as well. Unless we ran into a batch of Seagate Enterprise/Server grade drives with a bad firmware, that nearly even killed our RAID6 system. We had 6 of 16 drives failing within a week… So I definitely would not take a chance there.
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That’s why I want all my data on a least 2 RAIDS now…anything can fail at any time! At least HD prices make it feasible now.
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