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 5: Stripes All Around

Select one of the drives from Disk Utility's left-side pane and click the RAID tab. Give the impending RAID volume a name (we called ours Ham), leave the volume format at the default Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and select Striped RAID Set from the Raid Type pull-down menu. Now drag in the drives that you want to use from the left-side pane. Once both drives are added to the RAID set in Disk Utility's main panel, click on one and make sure the RAID Type pull-down says Slice. Then do the same for the other drive in the set.

Make sure both drives are set to Slice.

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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