SD / RAID Mac Recommendations

[NoNameBRand]

Originally Posted by pburt16

The big question is: What is the purpose of having an extra internal hard drive (or more) if people generally recommend NOT striping internal drives together as a huge system disk. And, why this is a bad idea, even if you are regularly backing up that disk with a backup drive (for SuperDuper) and/or external Raid 1 array. Is RAID a good idea? What is the purpose of four G5 internal drives on an intel Mac?

Firstly, "RAID0" isn't RAID - that "R" stands for redundant, and a stripped array of N disks is N times more likely to fail than one disk.

However, If you have good backups, there's no compelling reason not to use a striped array for a boot volume. It'll certainly be fast.


I use my second internal drive as a clone of the first (two partitions on each, one for my System + Users and the other for my photographs) - it's just more convenient to me to have my hot backup inside the box. I'd considered mirroring them (RAID1), but a nightly clone is good enough for availability and being able to selectively backup prior to updates and immediately rolling back from failed updates is wonderful.

I have two external disks in an eSATA enclosure, and use partitions on them for: music, movies, games, backup of other computers at my place and now Time Machine; all stuff I don't need backed up.

I've taken a small partition off each of my four disks (~8 GB each), and used them to create a four disk striped array for Photoshop scratch use, which is the only thing I do that needs a super fast volume, and it really, really helps. If I did video work, I would make a much larger striped volume and use it as the work disk.