[DM-MUG] External Drive Enclosures/RAID1 and OS X

[Matthew Wheeler]

General opinion of OS X's built-in RAID is that it is a last resort. It 
works but has faulty restore routines. My experience backs this up as 
I've simulated a failed RAID and the internal tools (including Terminal 
access) were very verbose, incredibly slow and eventually required 
reformatting to recover the failed unit. Data was recoverable, but I 
couldn't repair the RAID as expected.

On the other hand, I've installed a couple of Xserves with a RAID 
config (not Xserve RAID hardware product) that run 24/7 and they've 
never failed.

Opinion of SoftRAID is very good, though I've never used it.

Also see firewiredirect.com.

Matthew

On Aug 13, 2004, at 1:42 PM, Douglas wrote:

> Hi Jim,
>
> For Firewire enclosures I'd look at http://www.wiebetech.com/ and 
> perhaps http://www.granitedigital.com/.
>
> My experience (SCSI only, not Firewire) with pre-OS X versions of 
> SoftRAID have been uniformly good.
>
> Best, Doug
>
>
> On Friday, August 13, 2004, at 12:41  PM, Jim Turner wrote:
>
>> First question:  anyone know where I can get a 2-drive 3.5" external
>> firewire case for ultra ATA drives?  I found this guy:
>>
>> http://www.cooldrives.com/3usb20ficodu.html
>>
>> But I'm not too sure I want something that has a 320GB disk size 
>> limit.
>> I'm planning on mirroring two 250GB drives, but I would suspect that
>> sometime in the future, I'll need bigger drives (this is for backing 
>> up
>> my G4 and the wife's laptop).  That, and the enclosure there is only
>> FW400.  I'd like to have the option of using FW800 someday as well.
>> Anyone have any suggestions?
>>
>> Second question: Has anyone played with OS X's software RAID doodads? 
>>  I
>> see that it'll do it now as part of the OS, but I've not had the
>> opportunity to try it out.  Is it pretty reliable? Or should I go and
>> get something like SoftRAID?
>>
>> Oh yeah, one other thing... in the last meeting, wasn't it discussed
>> that there was going to be a photo contest for the books being given
>> away this month?  What happened to that?  I really need that Adobe 
>> book
>> as my photoshop kung fu isn't as strong as I'd like it to be.
>>
>> Jim
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Dmmug mailing list
>> Dmmug@dmmug.org
>> http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/dmmug
>>
>>
> "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
> Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dmmug mailing list
> Dmmug@dmmug.org
> http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/dmmug
>