Can you RAID 2 firewire drives together??

[Zak Mussig]

Definitely haven’t done that before… but I feel you first instinct (bad idea) may be the right one. Could you just split the files between the two drives, and keep track, if need be, of where they need to get put back after your format?

Zak

[Aaron Neitz]

Yeah, but I’d rather just use Carbon Copy Cloner so I know nothing gets missed. One fell swoop.

[Walter Biscardi]

[CharlieX2] “This is probably a bad idea, but has anyone had sucess in building a software RAID from 2 identical FW 800 drives? Just for a temporary backup of a large JBOB while it gets reformatted?”

Absolutely. If you read my review on the LaCie Big Disk Extreme you’ll see this is exactly one of the setups I used. It works extremely well and you get a lot of speed by doing this.

What you want to do is pick up a FW 800 card for your G5. You connect one drive to the card and one direct directly to the G5 FW800 Port. This essentially gives you Dual Channel for higher speeds.

Now use the Apple Disk Utility to Stripe the drives together and you’re set.

I did label my drives to ensure that if I moved them they would still be connected the same way, one drive to the G5 (or laptop) and the other to the FW800 card.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Aaron Neitz]

Sweet. Exactly my thought with the Lacie. This is going onto an XSERVE that already has dual FW800 ports.

[David Smith]

[CharlieX2] “This is going onto an XSERVE that already has dual FW800 ports. “

Charlie,

I believe it’s not the number of ports, but the number of busses that’s the issue. If both ports are on the same buss you won’t get the speed Walter was talking about. If the XSERVE has ports on seperate busses you’re good to go.

Regards,
David

[Aaron Neitz]

Cool. don’t need speed – just lots of storage. THANKS!!!

[Jeremy Garchow]

CCC won’t make it faster, that’s for sure. i would just fill up one drive then fill up the other drive. You can do a sum check to see if you have all the info.

I don’t know if CCC will write to a RAID set that you are proposing, but it probably won’t care.

Jeremy