Mirroring a drive ?

D

djbeta

Registered
I have a G5 running 10.3.9, a web site and several MySQL databases.

It would be a minor catastrophe if the hard drive crashed. Yes, I am backing things up, but can not afford to be down for the time it would take me to reinstall and reconfigure a new drive.

Could someone suggest some options I might have for mirroring the startup volume ??

I'd love to set things up so that if the drive failed, I could just plop in a new hard drive. Money is not *that* much of an issue, but of course, I would prefer to spend as little as possible to do the job correctly.

thanks :)
 
Do a software RAID 1 array.

Essentially you have two disks of the same size that are mirrored, everytime a file is written, it is written to both hard drives, so if one fails you can just run off of the other one.

How you add that too your current setup with a short downtime is a little more tricky. When I got a second disk for my G5 and did a RAID 0 array (parts of filles on both disks i.e. not very safe) I made an ASR image of my hard disk with carbon copy cloner then RAIDed the disks in disk utility (boot from CD) and restored the image from a firewire drive and that was it. There might be better options from going from one hard drive to a RAID 1 setup out there that might let you have little or no down time at all. It's worth a shot, most servers these days use some level of RAID in their storage for speed and data redundancy reasons.

Or, you could schedule a process to create an apple softare restore (ASR) image nightly or whenever to an external drive, this wouldn't be as accurate and would chew up CPU time whenever it ran, but it would be fairly easy to restore in case of a disaster.
 
>Do a software RAID 1 array.
>
>Essentially you have two disks of the same size that are mirrored, everytime a file >is written, it is written to both hard drives, so if one fails you can just run off of >the other one.

Is this possible on a standard OS X box ? (i'm not running server)

So, I need a RAID 1 software setup.

I'll start looking into it. If anyone has any more feedback, please let me know ! :)
thanks.
 
djbeta said:
>Do a software RAID 1 array.
>
>Essentially you have two disks of the same size that are mirrored, everytime a file >is written, it is written to both hard drives, so if one fails you can just run off of >the other one.

Is this possible on a standard OS X box ? (i'm not running server)

So, I need a RAID 1 software setup.

I'll start looking into it. If anyone has any more feedback, please let me know ! :)
thanks.
Click to expand...

Its supported out of the box, I have it running on my dual 1.8 GHz G5 and 10.4.2. Basically all you have to do is get a drive that is the same size as the other, you can use a bigger (or smaller) one but you will only get the size of the smallest drive so you would be wasting money to get a bigger one.

I would also like to take the time to point out that a RAID 1 solution will only prevent from a disk hardware failure. For example if the one hard disk goes bad or something you can run of 2nd hard drive, if the OS or software gets corrupted you will be screwed because both drives will be showing the exact same thing. I would also figure out a way to make sure if the software goes down you can get back up quickly, something like imaging and perhaps separate partitions/drives for Software and data.
 
is there a performance hit assoc. with a soft raid 1 setup ?

could you tell me where you found the instructions for settting this up ?
i don't see it in the Tiger help..

a google search yielded softraid.com do i need their software ??
 
so, i guess, i could then get a bigger drive and mirror only the first partition of it ? or would that be asking for trouble.


might there be any issues with running the following on such a setup ?


Filemaker Server 7
MySQL
PhP 4.3

I'm currently in 10.3.9 on this box, and am concerned about going to 10.4 because of possiblity of messing up the filemaker/php/mysql stuff..
anyone have any experience with any of these after upgrading to tiger ?
 
1 x 160 Gb Seagate Drive

1 partition with 10.3.9 on it.

I'm ordering another 160Gb drive.. and want to mirror the system drive onto it.

I checked out softraid.. it looks pretty cool. Any thoughts on that ?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top