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What are you doing with 2nd HD?

flatfoot said:
Everybody should have a decent backup plan. If they do, they can also use RAID 0.
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A backup is only as good as the time it was last backed up. Say you do a back up every 24 hours, you could still lose 24 hours worth of data. Yes this could still happen without RAID0, but you've doubled your chance of this with RAID0. Is that really worth the slight improvement in day to day operations? Especially when RAID0 isn't nearly as fast as a low end SSD?

EDIT: Especially since SSD's have come down in price and hard drives are still sky high!
 
I have 4tb of external backup plus CrashPlan.

So I'm not worried about it at all if I do try RAID. I am backed up in 3 other places.
 
paulrbeers said:
First off RAID0 is NOT a RAID even if they say it is (there is no redundancy) and secondly do NOT RAID0. Never Ever. You double your chance of failure since you now have two drives that all of your data is stored across and if one fails you lose everything. And as previously stated, RAID0 will help a little at boot, but otherwise small data files are more affected by Seek times of your drives rather than transfer speeds and your seek times will not be improved at all by RAID0. You might get a bit of a boost when opening large programs as well, but a SSD is a much better choice for boosting speed. The only reason to use RAID0 is for "proving your d*** size" in sequential read benchmarks which your computer will do very little of and seriously threatens your data.
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Paul it is not true for all, it depends on what your use is with the raid0.
I have a 768gb raid0 with 3 samsung series 810 ssds in two lacie little big disks along with a fourth drive in the little big disk and a fifth drive in the mini itself .

My ( d ____ size) is not why I do it.
The mini runs like a mac pro for many tasks (not much graphics crunching) this is why I built a diy pc for heavy graphics..

The 768gb ssd raid0 has been smoking fast with all data and programs. the t-bolt lacie little big disk is really stable. and the 4th and 5th drives do back for me. But my work on the mini is not standard pc work.

My work is testing setups of mac and pc's then selling them on ebay and privately. Worst case scenario is a few hours of tests are lost. They can get done over. I have 3 copies of the 768gb raid0 osx-data drive and I have a nas backup.

Then again most users are not doing what I do. They won't have the backups .
 
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philipma1957 said:
Then again most users are not doing what I do. They won't have the backups .
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You stated it best here, most users do not do what you do. Most users do it so they can brag on some chat room or in some online game that they get X for speed due to their quad RAID 0 in sequential reads and then one fails and and all I can do is laugh. In the end, it won't make a difference (especially if RAID0ing mechanical drives), I know because I used to have a setup like this and it didn't make more than 10% difference at boot up and loading applications. RAID0 will only be faster for sequential reads and writes which is why it is pointless for OS/App drives.
 
I bought the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server a bit more than two years ago to use as a server. Because I wasn't sure of disk partitioning I would need, and because the drives were slow (5400RPM notebook drives), I decided to go with RAID 0 to turn it into a potentially faster 1GB drive.

At roughly the two year mark one of the drives failed. I have backups (the system automatically performs a backup every night), but the problem with RAID 0 is you don't know which drive failed. I'm under Applecare so I took the mini in. Their drive diagnostic (which had to run overnight) showed nothing even though I could demonstrate the disk had bad spots somewhere. Apple policy doesn't allow replacing both drives. So I had to reformat without RAID. At least now I know how to partition my data (in fact I've got 5.5TB of externals now), so I set it up and it failed within a day. This time I could point out the bad drive so it got replaced. Time to repair from discovery of problem -- 12 days. Luckily I have a contingency plan for server failure.

I'll never use RAID 0 again, but my reason is the unacceptable Applecare policies.
 
I would not be without a second drive. I've got a server with a 500 gb 7200 rpm drive and a 128 Gb SSD. The SSD is running windows, the HDD is running OS X and is using Winclone 3.0 to backup the bootcamp partition. I back the OS X partition up to an external Time Machine disk.

I'm running Windows 98-99% of the time and use OS X for windows backup and emergency internet access.

When travelling I only take a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, the mac mini and a hmdi cable and a mini-display to DVI cable with me. I use a hotels or companies monitor on location. I can recover (not that I have required recovering Windows since XP SP2) without additional hardware.
 
I am wanting to get a Mac Mini server to use as an always on iTunes media storage device/Handbrake encoding machine. I was planning to RAID 0 the internal drives to gain more total storage space, any speed boost would be secondary to me. Is this wrong thinking? Should I just buy (2) 1 terabyte drives to put in it and use 1 internal for media storage and 1 for an internal Time Machine, and use the stock drives for backup? What's the best course of action? I was wanting to get the most storage space for the least amount of money.
 
kobyh15 said:
I am wanting to get a Mac Mini server to use as an always on iTunes media storage device/Handbrake encoding machine. I was planning to RAID 0 the internal drives to gain more total storage space, any speed boost would be secondary to me. Is this wrong thinking? Should I just buy (2) 1 terabyte drives to put in it and use 1 internal for media storage and 1 for an internal Time Machine, and use the stock drives for backup? What's the best course of action? I was wanting to get the most storage space for the least amount of money.
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RAID0 isn't worth the increased risk of data loss in this case. Especially when streaming wirelessly you won't have any benefit from RAID0.

I'd get two 1TB drives and use Disk Utility to concatenate them (=> one 2TB volume spanned over the two 1TB disks. I think this way you'd still have the data on one disk if the other one fails.

Internal backup (also Time Machine) doesn't make much sense. In case of a power surge, for example, if one internal drive died, the other would as well.
For the Time Machine backup I'd rather use a green 2TB drive in an external enclosure, preferably FireWire since it's faster than USB; USB drives/enclosures, however, are cheaper.

EDIT: You don't have to get the server model to be able to use two HDDs in the mini: https://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/01/installing-a-second-hard-drive-in-your-2011-mac-mini/
 
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flatfoot said:
RAID0 isn't worth the increased risk of data loss in this case. Especially when streaming wirelessly you won't have any benefit from RAID0.

I'd get two 1TB drives and use Disk Utility to concatenate them (=> one 2TB volume spanned over the two 1TB disks. I think this way you'd still have the data on one disk if the other one fails.

Internal backup (also Time Machine) doesn't make much sense. In case of a power surge, for example, if one internal drive died, the other would as well.
For the Time Machine backup I'd rather use a green 2TB drive in an external enclosure, preferably FireWire since it's faster than USB; USB drives/enclosures, however, are cheaper.

EDIT: You don't have to get the server model to be able to use two HDDs in the mini: https://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/01/installing-a-second-hard-drive-in-your-2011-mac-mini/
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I understand that. I want the more powerful CPU. Could I concatenate the two stock drives already in the Mini and get a 1 TB backup drive. Hoping the new Mini has USB 3.
 
kobyh15 said:
I understand that. I want the more powerful CPU. Could I concatenate the two stock drives already in the Mini and get a 1 TB backup drive. Hoping the new Mini has USB 3.
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Yes, you could. Though 1TB is not much storage for a media server. Hard drive prices have come down again and you can sell the two 500GB drives after replacing them with two 1TB drives. People tend to pay a lot for "original Apple drives".
Make sure to get 9.5mm high drives; there are 12.5mm ones, too, that won't fit in the mini.

If you decide to keep the smaller drives, you might still want to consider a 2TB backup drive. This way Time Machine could still serve its purpose if your internal drive is nearly full.

I doubt Apple will adopt USB 3. For a backup drive, however, speed isn't that important, so USB 2 would be fine if you don't want to pay a premium for FireWire, let alone Thunderbolt.
 
flatfoot said:
Yes, you could. Though 1TB is not much storage for a media server. Hard drive prices have come down again and you can sell the two 500GB drives after replacing them with two 1TB drives. People tend to pay a lot for "original Apple drives".
Make sure to get 9.5mm high drives; there are 12.5mm ones, too, that won't fit in the mini.

If you decide to keep the smaller drives, you might still want to consider a 2TB backup drive. This way Time Machine could still serve its purpose if your internal drive is nearly full.

I doubt Apple will adopt USB 3. For a backup drive, however, speed isn't that important, so USB 2 would be fine if you don't want to pay a premium for FireWire, let alone Thunderbolt.
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Fair enough. If Ivy Bridge supports USB 3 on the chipset, why wouldn't they?
 
flatfoot said:
That's true. I wasn't aware of that.
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Yeah, keeping my figures crossed. Thanks for the info. I just started the whole handbrake ripping thing a month or so ago when I got the new apple TV and an iPad. It's nice having access to everything at all times over the home network though.
 
On one of my MMs I have a 1TB Scorpio Blue as the second drive. It holds, DropBox, Adobe CS5 (Huge App that I don't use all the time), and Parallels (Windows 7). Technically you could load any large App that you don't use that often. I don't find any real difference.

On the other MM with a 500GB Drive as the second drive, it acts as the TimeMachine to the main HD.
 
I have a 128GB SSD as my main system drive and use the other 500GB HDD for parallels, my iPhoto library and Parallels. iTunes library is stored on an external drive. I also use it as working project storage. If I'm ripping and re-encoding Blu Rays or some other video project I can dump the files on there and not have to worry about running out of space on my SSD.

I still keep documents and things like that on the main drive. They don't take up much space and it helps keep the second drive more easily organized. I can also tell Time Machine to backup the iPhoto library while ignoring everything else on that drive, while it backs up everything on the main drive.
 
What are the odds of the new Mac Mini server coming with a BTO option of dual 1 TB drives?
 
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