I've got 2 GMax external drive enclosures, each one takes 2 3.5" SATA disks (up to 1TB per disk), configured to appear as a single 'JBOD' unit. I use FW800 out of the MacBook Pro into one unit, and then the pass-thru connector from that unit to the next one (each unit has a pass-thru connector; these boxes really were a steal at the price).
I use one unit as my main 'projects and laptop backups' drive, and the second unit is my backup copy of the first one. I've been managing the backup copies using SuperDuper!, manually initiating a 'smartcopy' of the main drive to the backup drive at least once a week.
The disks I had in one of the units recently failed, and now I've bought 4 identical new 1TB Seagate disks. Before I set things up much as they were before (2TB in each unit), I was wondering if I could make a software RAID 1 unit out of them? I thought that this would be an easier system for me to manage than manually backing-up.
Has anyone run a software RAID 1 drive on external drives like this? Is it worth the trouble, or should I stick to my current regime? I'm not looking to increase performance at all, I'm looking to minimise the human-involvement in my backup process. 🙂
This would be on the current patch of Snow Leopard.
Best Answer
I haven't tried FW800 specifically but we use a lot of OSX-RAID1 on internal drives and i used it once on FW400.
You just have to create a mirrored disk set from the external disks in DiskUtility. You should use the whole disks and let DiskUtility do the partitioning. That makes it easier to rebuild and boot off the set.
You can also start out with data already on one disk, then create a degraded set on a second disk, copy everything over and integrate the first disk into the set but this requires some non-supported use of command-line
diskutil. The same goes for creating partitions on the RAID set or creating a RAID out of partitions. (All of which is perfectly normal and handy on e.g. Linux)