RAID 1 mirror internal?

[SDAVE]

I just got 2x3TB SATA drives for my 2008 MP.

I just wanted to know if its worth RAID 1 mirroring them. I know that they become part of a splice and if one dies, the other one wont be available until a rebuild.

So is there another better way of doing this?

 

[VirtualRain]

I just got 2x3TB SATA drives for my 2008 MP.

I just wanted to know if its worth RAID 1 mirroring them. I know that they become part of a splice and if one dies, the other one wont be available until a rebuild.

So is there another better way of doing this?

I've never used RAID1 before, but as far as I know, the whole point of RAID1 is that if a drive dies, you have a duplicate copy on the other drive that's good to go and you can keep accessing the data.

 

[SDAVE]

I've never used RAID1 before, but as far as I know, the whole point of RAID1 is that if a drive dies, you have a duplicate copy on the other drive that's good to go and you can keep accessing the data.

I heard you can't access the data on the second drive.

I've done RAID0 before, but not RAID 1 on a Mac Pro.

I guess I can give it a try since these drives are fresh and empty...maybe make a RAID1 and remove one to see what happens. But I also heard if you lose the OS or if it's a new OS install, the drives will be unreadable? Is this true?

 

[hfg]

With RAID-1 (mirror) if one of the drives fails, you can continue operating from the other drive until such time as you replace the failed drive and the array rebuilds.

The whole point of RAID-1 is data availability. It is not, however, a backup solution.

 

[SDAVE]

The whole point of RAID-1 is data availability. It is not, however, a backup solution.

Ya, it is not as good as LTO, or multiple drive backups, but at least it increases your chances of saving data by 50%.

 

[h9826790]

For RAID 1, you CAN access the data when one of the driver die. You can crate and simulate this process.

1) Plugin a USB stick (e.g. 16G)

2) Use disk utility to crate a partition a 16G partition on you HDD.

3) RAID them together in disk utility (RAID 1 of course)

4) Now you have a 16G RAID 1 partition, just copy some files to that partition.

5) eject the USB stick

6) Now, your RAID 1 partition is broken, but the data on your HDD still there and accessible.

Anyway, RAID 1 is not a real backup solution, it just keep your system alive. If you accidentally delete an important file, the same file will also be deleted on your mirror HDD and can't be recover.

For system backup, I prefer to use Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC), just schedule it to clone your boot disk to the standby disk (let's say once per day). If you accidentally break your OS, you can still boot your computer with the backup disk, and clone it back to the primary disk. the CCC can also serve like the time machine. However, I personally prefer to use time machine to backup / recover a particular "version" of files.

 

[SDAVE]

I mainly want to use my 3TB RAID 1 as a backup solution for "other" files.

I have a main drive that backs up my OS SSD via time machine .

 

[h9826790]

I mainly want to use my 3TB RAID 1 as a backup solution for "other" files.

If you use RAID 1 as the backup destination. That will be very safe. Even though one of the HDD die during the backup process, you should still able to finish the backup process and recover those files afterward. RAID 1 basically keep your backup partition always available.