Hi all, i'm looking for some general RAID advice. I just bought an external hardrive bay with 4 dedicated oxford 911 firewire 411 chips. Right now i have 4 250gig ide 7200 generic HDDs in there. I was wondering if a striped RAID arrays actually increase the performance over 4 individual daisy chained drives (since i assume FW 400 is the bottleneck). Also, since i am not currently mirroring the array, if one drive burns out, will I lose ALL the data striped to all 4 drives? If I were to invest a whole lot money into another RAID system, what would be recommended (SATA etc)? Any feedback would be very much appreciated.
RAID advice
- Thread starter maxxer
- Start date
tumbleguts
Registered
General RAID advice... I'm not sure I understand how you've got your firewire enclosure connected up to your Mac - but if it's only thru one Firewire 400 connection, that's not good... Firewire 400 means 400 megabits p/sec - which means 50MB per/s (8 bits in a MegaByte). Since most recent 7,200 (s)ATA drives reach between 40MB and 50MB per/sec sustained transfer - one Firewire connection has enough bandwidth for one drive only. If you've got each drive connected thru it's own Firewire connection - well... that's a different story... RAID those babies together and experience some speed! You are correct - RAID 0 (stripping) will give you the ultimate performance kick - but no protection should one drive fail - as you will lose the volume which is made up of all 4 drives. Apple's RAID 0 is pretty stable - but don't kid yerself - u r playing russian roulette! Recommendations? Probably not best to ask me as I'm a SCSI guy... 