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Stripey nicey
by Bruce Ure at 11:15 15/04/07 (Forum::Technical Advice::General)
Just wanted to enthuse about the RAID-ing of the drives in my Mac Pro.
I'd been using Lightroom, which felt like it was running through treacle, for some time. I thought I'd have a go at making the machine run quicker, and simplify my three data volumes down to one, so I striped the three 470-gig drives yesterday (leaving the 10K-spinny 160 gig as the system drive), and it's like a new machine. Very impressed. Lightroom is now usable; almost fluid in its usability.

The downside is I'm now essentially three times as likely to suffer a disc failure as if I had one huge drive the same size, but I've got good backups, and the performance increase is worth it.

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Stripey nicey Bruce Ure - 11:15 15/04/07
- Deleted User Account - 21:38 15/04/07
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Re: Stripey nicey Bruce Ure - 07:32 16/04/07
Software raid... and no parity, as if something fails I'll just recreate and restore. It's not ideal but it is fast :)

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- Deleted User Account - 10:23 16/04/07
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Re: Stripey nicey Bruce Ure - 10:55 16/04/07
I've got about a terrabyte of data (mostly films, home movies, music and photographs, all badly in need of rationalising, but it's easier to throw disc space at it than rationalise it) which was distributed over 3 x 500 gig drives.

Now I've got the same amount of data on one huge raid drive (made from 3 fresh discs).

I'm keeping the original discs as backups (offsite).

I know I'm taking a risk, but it wasn't actually that much grief transferring the data from the 500-gig drives to the new raid drive. I just let them copy overnight.

Backing up new stuff will be more of an issue but I have here a box which I intend to stuff with 3 big drives and back everything up remotely with Rsync, or similar. Until then I'll just put important new data on an external USB drive.

I don't think there are any major issues with OSX's raid implementation. I've used various IDE (PATA and SATA) raid controllers, but never again. The only way I'd consider hardware raid would be top-end stuff.

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Re: Stripey nicey Gordon Hundley - 04:47 20/04/07
Really? I'm fairly happy with LSI's cheap SATA RAID controllers. No use at all for Macs, but decent for shitty little Linux servers that need quick and survivable disks.
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DrGoon
Re: Stripey nicey Bruce Ure - 07:09 20/04/07
I had a very nasty experience with a broken raid set. Took me days to recover almost all of my data. It was dodgy windows drivers, but once bitten...

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