Soft RAID question

[slughead]

I posted this as one of my questions in another forum but I realized it's more appropriate here

I'm planning on getting a G5 DP2.5.

If I get the 160 gig and buy another 3rd party SATA 160GB 7200RPM drive (guaranteed to be a DIFFERENT make/model), can I link them with soft raid and boot off them?

Also, is it reliable? is it faster? by how much?

 

[James.Paul]

I posted this as one of my questions in another forum but I realized it's more appropriate here

I'm planning on getting a G5 DP2.5.

If I get the 160 gig and buy another 3rd party SATA 160GB 7200RPM drive (guaranteed to be a DIFFERENT make/model), can I link them with soft raid and boot off them?

Also, is it reliable? is it faster? by how much?

I bought my 2.0 G5 dual processor in November. I bought it with a 250gb drive. I then bought a seperate 250gb drive. The installed drive was a Maxtor 6Y model. The additional one was a Maxtor 7Y. The Apple dealer said that their would be no problems using them as a Raid set and they were aware i was going to 'Stripe' the disks. My first disk failed within a couple of weeks and a replacement was ordered. The replacement seems to operate fine (for last 5-6 months). However, it may have been causing boot up problems. The G5 would begin start up but then ground to a halt with all fans going ballistic and my G5 was about to take off!!! I also had some problems waking it up from sleep (it never failed a hardware test though). The guys that have looked at the machine over the last few days think that the raid was causing that problem (possibly the fact that model numbers are different). They tried booting up with the raid deleted and have reported no start up problems.

That story aside i never had any problems actually using the discs and the performance has been fine. If i was going to use raid on a new 2.5 i would get Apple to install as a BTO then you would get two identical model numbers. I wish i had done that now but i don't regret it though.

Good luck with the 2.5,

 

[slughead]

The guys that have looked at the machine over the last few days think that the raid was causing that problem (possibly the fact that model numbers are different). They tried booting up with the raid deleted and have reported no start up problems.

Whoa.. I don't like the sound of that at all..

Anyone else had any problems with SoftRAID on a G5?

 

[Laslo Panaflex]

I can't tell entirely if you guys are talking about SoftRAID, the 3rd party app, or apple's built in software raid. If you are talking about SoftRAID I can only offer this advice, DONT get 250GB WD drives and use them in a mirror. Specifically model #WD2500JB-32FUAO. There are imcompatibilty issues with the drives firmware and SoftRAID, it has been comfirmed by the softraid developers. They simply don't work with SoftRAID. These drives also seem to not work well with apples software raid. I had two of these drives set up in an external firewire JBOD system set up as mirror for data redundantcy. When the raid got out of sync, and it would not rebuild, making the mirror worthless. Needless to say I got new drives, ones that work with SoftRAID and used them to make a mirror and it has been working fine ever since. The mirror has even gotton out of sync and rebuilt itself several times. (Hard reboots make the mirror go out of sync)

Bottom line, as long as you don't get the above named drives, you should be fine with either setup.