Mirroring Drives

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macmastah

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I have a powermac G4, with a 60 gb drive. How would I miror this onto another drive of the same capacity. Is there software that would enable me to mirror drives?

Thanks
 
macmastah said:
I have a powermac G4, with a 60 gb drive. How would I miror this onto another drive of the same capacity. Is there software that would enable me to mirror drives?

Thanks
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As I understand it you want to copy all of the files from one drive to another. I am assuming that you would also like the copy to be bootable. If that is the case got to http://www.versiontracker.com and search for a file called Carbon Copy Cloner. The current version is 2.3. Although some users have had problems with it I have had good success. The one thing I have to do is not copy Norton Filesaver files. I've only run it a few times under Panther though.It worked well under jaguar.

For more info check out this article I wrote on the process for ATPM
http://www.atpm.com/8.10/cloning.shtml
 
The other thing that comes to my mind about drive mirroring is setting up a RAID array. That page explains the different types and has links to information on setting up an array.
 
That page has links to setting up a RAID under Windows, Arden... not too helpful on Macintosh board! ;)

There's only two built-in RAID options in Mac OS X, and that's striping or mirroring, which you can accomplish through Disk Utility (just click on any device name and click the RAID tab).
 
ElDiablo said:
That page has links to setting up a RAID under Windows, Arden... not too helpful on Macintosh board! ;)
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My bad, I didn't delve that deeply into it. That page explains what RAID is, though.

So you're saying that only RAID 0 and 1 are possible with Mac? Geez, I would prefer RAID 5 or something...
 
No, I'm saying that RAID 1 and 0 are supported natively with OS X through the software. There are plenty of hardware options that are compatible with Mac that will do other RAID schemes, like RAID 5.

The XServe RAID can do RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 3, RAID 5, RAID 0+1 and RAID 10,30 and 50 Striping over RAID 1, 3 and 5.

RAID 5 would be ridiculous for any home user. That's like using a leafblower to cool off a bite of hot food.
 
You cannot use OS X's mirroring to mirror the boot drive on most Apple hardware (you can on the Xserver, and I believe on G4 server boxes). At some point SoftRAID is going to support booting from a mirrored boot disk, but it does not yet. So, if you only have one 60G drive in your box, you can't mirror it. Now, you could add 2 60G drives, and mirror those and store all your important data on them, it's simple to do via the Disk Utility.

Brian
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
RAID 5 would be ridiculous for any home user. That's like using a leafblower to cool off a bite of hot food.
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Not at all, I used to have RAID 5 volumes at home. It's the best way to make one large volume off of multiple disks with redundancy. It was alot cheaper to get 5 9G scsi disks, then two 36G disks. RAID 5 with 5 9G disks give you 36G useable space, with the ability to lose a single drive and not lose any data. RAID 1 with 2 36G disks give you 36G useable space, with the ability to lose one drive and not lose any data. Ofcourse, the read performance of the RAID 1 is much faster then RAID 5, while, in some circumstances the write performance of RAID 5 can be greater then RAID 1, in others it can be slower then RAID 1.

Now, RAID 1+0 is overkill for any home user :)

Brian
 
That's true, btoneill... I might add that Sonnet's and ACARD's PCI RAID cards support booting from striped volumes... I don't know about mirrored, but Sonnet's info page on their ATA/133 RAID card states that you can boot from attached drives, and I'm taking that to mean even drives that are striped and mirrored, since it's a hardware RAID configuration -- the system would see either the RAID 1 or RAID 0 as one physical drive and the card would do all the work.
 
btoneill said:
Not at all, I used to have RAID 5 volumes at home. It's the best way to make one large volume off of multiple disks with redundancy. It was alot cheaper to get 5 9G scsi disks, then two 36G disks.
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Right, I'm sure that many home users have RAID 5 setups, but for what? Most of the RAID 5 users have some need for a RAID setup apart from the "coolness" factor -- for example, graphic designers that manipulate big PhotoShop images for a living and programmers that store many gigabytes of SQL databases and what-not. For those that work from home, yes, RAID 5 is a viable and handy solution to redundancy and safety of data all while boosting speed. But for the casual Mac user who surfs the web, checks email and does a little PhotoShopping and iPhotoing, RAID 5 is major overkill. Agree?
 
When I think RAID 5, I don't think performance. RAID 5 has OK performance, but it's biggest advantage as far as I'm concered, is it's price. RAID 5 is one of the cheapest ways to get redundant data. RAID 5 is most commonly used for file servers and the like, but some people use it for Databases as it's redudnant, and fairly good on performance. If you actually need performance, RAID 5 would be one of the last RAID types I'd suggest. RAID 1+0 (or 0+1) is the best for performance, and it has redundancy. RAID 0 is the next best on performance, but it has no redundancy. RAID 0 is really only good for people who need high speed disk access, but don't care about the data, such as doing video editing. When you edit video, you also have the video on tape, and the data doesn't stay on the disk long term, you import, edit, export. If you lose a disk, you don't lose years worth of data.

Now for home users, I think the biggest issue that people have, is they trust disk drives. I never do, if my data isn't on a RAIDed volume, I have normally 2 other copies elsewhere. Disks are cheap, recreating your data, even for a home user, isn't. Now, if you say have an insane mp3 collection, making a nice RAID5 volume would be a great idea, take 4 60G disks, and you'll have a single 180G volume to store your data, with redundancy. You can get 60G disks for around $50, so it'd cost you $200 for 180G of redundant storage, vs. $250 for two 180G drives, or $125 for one 180G drive, in which you could lose all your music when it dies. That sound like a perfect use of RAID 5 to me :) But, ofcourse thats just me :)

Ofcourse, my idea of performance is probably different then most people on here as I deal with large high performance RAID systems on a daily basis, and not a single box that needs high performance has RAID 5, because it's just too slow for our needs.

Brian
 
I agree wholeheartedly. RAID is something that has traditionally been reserved for the "techie" types in corporate environments that need that kind of speed and safety, and has only recently been brought to the desktop and home user -- sure, there were RAID solutions that could be implemented in a home environment years ago, but for someone who isn't extremely proficient with computers and hardware, setting up a RAID was not a one-click task like it is now with OS X.

I understand that drives are cheap nowadays and setting up an inexpensive RAID 0 or 1 array is relatively easy, but you talk about the inexpensiveness of RAID 5... as I see it, there is no inexpensive way to do RAID 5. Yes, the drives themselves are dirt cheap, but the hardware required to run a RAID 5 would be the expensive factor. Looking around at things like PCI RAID cards and SoftRaid software, I see only RAID 1 and 0 options... what inexpensive RAID 5 options are there? Mac OS X doesn't support RAID 5 natively, inexpensive PCI RAID cards don't support RAID 5, and SoftRAID doesn't support RAID 5. The only solution I see is the XServe RAID, and that's WAY out of most home users' budgets.
 
I don't know of any inexpensive options for OS X, but there are many free options for *BSD, Linux, and Solaris for doing software RAID 5. Ofcourse, using software RAID 5 really really kills performance :)

Brian
 
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