Mac Pro - a single 2TB drive or 2x 1TB with OS X RAID?

[nabiti]

Hi all,


Just about to get myself a used 8 core Mac Pro, cca 2008 (2.8Ghz CPUs). As I work with audio I'd like to get as much HDD space as possible. 2TB seems like a decent size considering it's cheap to get an external drive of that size for backups.

Now which combo from the thread title is preferable? With one drive there's half the chance of failure, but is it faster if OS X reads of two drives simultaneously? I know this is the case with hardware RAID controllers, but does a journaling file system not get in the way? I would just have one big partition across the 2TB for the system, all apps and plugins, projects and sample libraries.

Oh while we're at it, how much does Time Machine slow down the system under a heavy load? (think Logic Pro with 30+ busses and 100+ plugins).

Cheers boys

 

[DeeEss]

2 disk raid is twice as fast as a single disk. THis is because it can split the data in half and write simultaneously to two drives.

Just the same a 3 drive RAID will be 3 times faster, a 4 drive 4 times faster etc.

Drives need to be the same speed and size obvs.

Time Machine in 10.5 is slower and more buggy that 10.6. 10.6 is pretty good. But yes it does put a load on your computer under use. See how you go, if it slows thing down you can turn it off and then manually hit backup rather than auto hourly, when necessary, at the icon in the menu bar.

 

[Transporteur]

Drives need to be the same speed and size obvs.

They don't. It is ideal to use identical drives, but it is not mandatory.

 

[philipma1957]

If you are in the usa 3tb hdds work in your machine

here is a major seller


http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-Western-Dig...ltDomain_0&hash=item588ceb3646#ht_3021wt_1250

I buy from the seller below. He will sell at 165 or so:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Western-Digital...ltDomain_0&hash=item4157872415#ht_1313wt_1141


here are test results with a pair in a 6tb raid0 via mac pro software. note the one with crazy high read number is not accurate as it shows the system cache . so a pair of 3tb in raid0 run around 225 read write for big file moves.