I actually did something similar in my G5 several months ago. I added 3 additional SATA drives using a Sonnet Jive carrier, used Apple Disk Utility to partition the drives and establish a RAID 0 striped array of 1 TB using 3 of the partitions; a fourth was set as a RAID 1 mirrored partition, it ended up being around 400 GB. Overall the performance was about the same as running from a single SATA drive. Last week I erased it all and set the 3 drives as a RAID 0 striped array, trusting Time Machine to do the backups onto the OEM SATA drive. It now runs faster and I think hourly backups are fine for me, I don't need real-time backups.
On Oct 17, 9:03 pm, Al Poulin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I know a few of you may have fun weighing in on an interesting > proposal and a few implied questions. My son sent this to me, asking > for a relay to folks who can help. My Apple Mail was initially set to > Helvetica font, so I first copied his message to TextEdit to view the > graphic in Courier. > > Here it is: > > QUOTE > [!!! View this message with COURIER font to display images > appropriately!!!] > > Dad -- > > I am going to be doing more research on the matter of using the > Disk Utility's software RAID 0 and 1 in a Mac Pro environment, but > wanted to get your opinions on the matter. I am mostly worried about > disk performance in a software RAID environment, especially when > mirroring is active. Below is a graphical and textual interpretation > of what I intend to do. > > In short, the goal of this setup is to stripe the boot and the home > partitions, yet provide a non-striped disk partition to which they > mirror for backup. As such, the goal is to obtain all the benefits of > stripped access speeds, yet provide a level of fallback if the > stripped disks were to fail. For /home, I would take two 512GB > partitions on separate disks for a stripe, then utilize the entirety > of a 1TB disk for the mirror. > > In Solaris there were ways to not execute the mirror updates > immediately, but rather on the hour, or once every midnight or so -- > thus providing the mirror to be close to the original as good enough > for backups and solutions sake, yet not interfering with the speed > boost of a stripped array. NeXTSTEP had this too if I remember > right. If I could locate that in the MacOS environment, it'd be the > direction I'd go in. > > The final option I may look at is to see if there are hardware RAID > cards for the Mac Pro which do not require re-ribboning the backplane > for access to the SATA drives; that could provide two-channel striping/ > mirroring of the same environment -- or better, a RAID-5 across 3 > disks for /home, a non-RAID boot disk, and a non-RAID Vista partition. > > Let me know if you have any thoughts; or feel free to pass this > thought thread around to others for feedback. > > +===========+ +===========+ +===========+ +===========+ > | A1 | | B1 | | C1 | | D1 | > | /root | | /root | | | | | > | 256G R0+1 | | 256G R0+1 | | | | | > | | | | | | | | > +===========+ +===========+ | /root | | | > | A2 | | B2 | | 512G R1 | | | > | | | | | | | | > | MISC R0 | | MISC R0 | | | | | > | | | | | | | /home | > +===========+ +===========+ +===========+ | 1TB R1 | > | A3 | | B3 | | C2 | | | > | | | | | | | | > | | | | | | | | > | | | | | Windows | | | > | /home | | /home | | Vista | | | > | 512G R0+1 | | 512G R0+1 | | | | | > | | | | | | | | > | | | | | | | | > +===========+ +===========+ +===========+ +===========+ > > /root > mirror (stripe[A1 (256GB slice) + B1 (256GB slice)] + C1 (512GB > slice)) > /home > mirror (stripe[A3 (512GB slice) + B3 (512GB slice)] + D1 (1TB slice)) > Scratch > stripe[A2 (256GB slice) + B2 (256GB slice)] > Bootcamp Vista > Partition[C2] > > UNQUOTE > > Thank you for any comments. > > Al Poulin --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
