Rock a Righteous RAID in Your Mac Pro

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How-Tos

Rock a Righteous RAID in Your Mac Pro

Posted 01/09/2007 at 2:36:04pm | by Niko Coucouvanis

Step 3: Don’t Forget Your Data

If you've been using your Mac Pro for a while, you've probably got some data on it - so get it now or kiss it good-bye. Setting up any kind of RAID requires erasing and reformatting all of the drives. You could clone your existing system and restore it onto the RAID volume, but as long as you're going to all this trouble, we suggest moving all of your data (iTunes songs and videos, photos, iMovie projects, and any important documents) to an external hard drive and - after finishing this how-to - starting fresh on your RAID volume with a newly installed OS X system, and then installing your apps and restoring any files from the external drive.

Playing with RAID requires erasing all of the participating hard drives.

COMMENTS: 7

TAGS: MacBook

COMMENTS

Rock a Righteous RAID in Your Mac Pro - Question on Order
Submitted by iSean1 (not verified) on Thu, 2007-01-18 20:25

Reading your article I noticed that you striped Disk 1 and Disk 2 then striped Disk 3 and Disk 4 before mirroring the two striped volumes into a RAID volume.

I have seen performance tests that would indicate better performance may be achieved by mirroring Disk 1 and Disk 2 then mirroring Disk 3 and Disk 4 then striping the 2 mirrored volumes into a RAID volume.

What was the thought process on doing it the way you have outlined vs. the alternative method of mirroring then striping?

Would appreciate any insight into which is the better method and why.

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Rock a Righteous RAID in Your Mac Pro - Follow-up to my question
Submitted by iSean1 (not verified) on Thu, 2007-01-18 20:46

Sorry to post a reply to my own question but just trying clear up what I am asking a little. You list in your article that RAID 10 is a Mirror of Stripes, but isn't it in fact RAID 01 that is a Mirror of Stripes while RAID 10 is a Stripe of Mirrors?

The performance testing I have seen on RAID 01 (mirroring two sets of stripes) has been disappointing due to what would appear to be a flaw in Apples Software RAID which prevents i from performing stripe reads across a mirror.

From what I gather it has the same write speed and very little performance gain in read speed over RAID 10 (stripe of two sets of mirrors). This lack of performance gain combined with the fact that from what I understand is inferior fault tolerance seems to make it a poor choice over RAID 10 (striping two sets of mirrors).

That is what I am trying to figure out. What was the rationale for using/recomending RAID 01 vs. RAID 10?

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Raid 10
Submitted by Will (not verified) on Mon, 2007-10-22 08:44

You're right. According to a few articles, -one is here: http://www.miracleas.com/BAARF/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt , the best hi perf raid to run is 10, which is in fact different from 0+1 http://www.bytepile.com/raid_class.php#10

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Is this even possible anymore?
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 2008-03-16 12:08

I can't seem to do this on my Feb 2008 Mac Pro. Do I need to first have the OS installed on an external drive or something? I can create the first striped array (even named it 'Ham'), but when I hit the '+' icon, and create the second array of striped drives, I can't drag the 3rd/4th drives over.

I can create a second set of striped drives, not using the '+' icon, but as a separate entity, and there doesn't appear to be a way to mirror the Ham array with it. I just wind up with two different arrays, and the OS can only be installed on one of them.

Thanks

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Raid 10 on a Mac Pro 08
Submitted by Lou (not verified) on Thu, 2008-03-20 13:57

Hello,
I installed 4 500gb drives last night in what I believe is a Raid 10,
it sounds like you didn't create the raid with all the drives in box, the have to arranged first then all created at the same time.
Here the Apple link that should help you.http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304377

Good Luck,
Lou

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4vipod nano video converter supports convert movie to ipod nano so that you can watch your favriout movies on ipod nano at any time.

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