What do you think of my storage drive configuration/backup in my Mac Pro?

[brooker]

The only part of this that i am a little concerned about is my two 1TB internal drives and the lacie bigger disk backup. Basically they will both be striped. Then I will mirror the stripped RAID's together.
There is a part of me that doesn't want to mirror the SATA drives to the lacie because it is firewire 800 which is slower that SATA II. Where there be some latency if I mirror my two RAID sets when one is SATA II and one is Firewire 800? If so, will it be noticable?

Thanks for all of your help again!!

Sounds like you are on your way to a terrific set up!

My final advice would be to not mirror the raid 0's across different interfaces (if it is even possible...). You really don't need to do raid 1 unless uptime is absolutely critical. Set the backup to run every night (or use time machine here too), and you will never lose more than a few hours of work if/when a drive fails.

If you do need those drives mirrored, you could use a pci card like this one. Maybe there are cheaper options out there. That would also allow those fast 15k drives.

party on!

 

[diehardmacfan]

thanks

yeh i wasn't sure about mirroring accross different interfaces

i will not get a PCI-E sata card and then get SATA drives because that will be too much money so i will do what you said and just have the backup run like sometime in the night

 

[tuartboy]

I would suggest giving this a good read (especially the part about ripping 1 drive out while under load) before going too much further. It would be much cleaner and allow for some real redundancy without the mess of all the externals wired up.

Also very cheap!

 

[JNB]

Regardless of the algebra involved, drive spanning is really not recommended except in those cases that you must mimic a larger single volume for a very specific purpose. As previously stated, the loss of a single drive is the loss of the entire volume. IPOF, spanning is really becoming a dinosaur because of modern single drives that provide the volume needed. 1TB drives - available off the shelf at Fry's, for goodness sake - should suffice for most operations (for the next couple of years, anyway).

The likely best total volume & redundancy overall (that a home professional can reasonably afford to deploy) would be RAID 5 + 1.

 

[Keebler]

The proposed cost of the drives not including the 750 GB internal drive that comes the mac pro will be about $1600. $820 for the lacie bigger disk and 400 for each of the 1TB hitachi hard drives. If I ever need more space I will get another 750GB or 1TB drive to go into Bay 4 of my mac pro. (If I ever run out of my 2 Terabyte RAID.

diehard... first, it sounds like a great setup to say the least.

but, if you're going to spend that much on HDs....have you looked at buying an xserve? i realize it's about $2200 more than what you're about to spend, but it sounds like you may need the space?

just a thought.

 

[tuartboy]

The likely best total volume & redundancy overall (that a home professional can reasonably afford to deploy) would be RAID 5 + 1.

5 + 1?! That would require a *minimum* of 6 drives (read: expensive!). 6 x 500Gb drives in 51 setup would give you only 1Tb of usable storage and no extra performance benefits over raid 5. Raid 51 is unbelievably redundant at the expense of storage, speed and cost.

Plain old raid 5 is the most effective (redundant and striped) for large arrays and only requires a minimum of 3 drives. You also only lose 1 drive out of the array to parity storage (N - 1). So, for the same 6 drives you would get the striping and redundancy (up to 1 drive failure at a time) with 2.5Tb of storage.

Unless you can go raid 6 (2 drive failures)...