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Soft boot RAID or am I just being paranoid
My Mac Pro’s boot drive hard crashed (it was backed up) and I’m not too concerned about restoring the data. I keep all my post projects on an external hardware RAID 5 8TB device.
But, given the amount of time it’s going to take me to restore the boot disk, between swapping out the drive, zero’g the new one, partitioning, etc., I’m considering installing two 2TB drives and building a soft RAID 1 set. It may be throwing money away, but at $120 drives are pretty inexpensive, and if one crashes, it will be less costly to my time to replace it vs. setting it up either standalone or as RAID 0.
Am I being conservative or paranoid (or both!)?
TIA,
M.
Michael Cowan
Heartbeest Productions, Inc.– Everything Matters
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3 Replies
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Hey Michael, a RAID-1 boot set is pretty common in some server environments where performance isn’t an issue. It’s not overkill at all. However, I don’t like two things about it:
1. Things can go slower, especially writing to the RAID-1 set.
2. If you have some sort of a software problem (like you install an update that breaks your system), then the RAID-1 doesn’t protect you because both drives will end up with the same software problem.
I tend to use Carbon Copy Cloner (https://www.bombich.com/) to make a bootable copy of my system drive once I get it running the way I want. Then, before major upgrades or changes, I try to remember to clone my boot drive again to that second hard drive. If the update goes awry and breaks the computer, I can boot off my backup and wipe the other drive clean.
This method has some downsides, as well; if you have an unexpected problem with your primary drive and haven’t cloned your drive in a while, then you could be out of luck. Also, running the clone takes a while. One nice thing about CCC is that it allows you to schedule a clone to run automatically — I usually run it overnight every week just to keep the clone relatively up-to-date. And, it can do a backup that only updates changed files, meaning the clone runs a lot quicker after the first time.
Sounds like you’re being smart about keeping important stuff on a separate drive — nice work. Lots of people use a RAID-1 boot set, so I wouldn’t think any less of you if you went that route. Both methods should get you back up and running within a few minutes, and then you can replace a dead hard drive at your leisure. A pretty cheap insurance policy.
Take care!
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Hi Dave,
Thanks for your reply!
Your reasons for not doing a boot RAID1 disk make sense and I was eager to get the darn thing back online, so I did do it that way. Hopefully, no harm, no foul.
I haven’t noticed a huge difference in performance, but if I do, I’ll probably scuttle it and go with a single drive and ghost it with CC or something like that.
Ciao!
m.
Michael Cowan
Heartbeest Productions, Inc.– Everything Matters
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Hey Michael, don’t sweat it — having the RAID-1 setup shouldn’t give you much trouble at all. I doubt the performance hit will be very noticeable, especially if you’re doing all your rendering to a separate drive. Plus, the real advantage of RAID-1 is that one of the drives could completely fail, and you could go right on working. That’s the reason it’s so popular in server environments where up-time is absolutely critical.
Take care and happy editing!
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