[X4U] RAID on Tiger

[Neil Laubenthal]

I've got a couple questions about making a RAID on Tiger with Disk Utility.

1. Can you make a RAID out of external FW drives? Disk Utilities help 
says you need IDE or SCSI drives. Disk Utility itself will allow you 
to select a FW drive (but not a partition on it, you can select 
either a partition or the entire drive for internal drives). I don't 
actually have 2 FW drives so I couldn't verify that it will work . . 
. but it seems to and OWC has a page talking about how to RAID their 
FW drives.

2. Assuming that you can do #1 and I mirrored 2 FW drives . . . does 
the OS notify you if one of the drives fails or do you have to run 
Disk Utility periodically to check?

3. Assuming that one of the two mirrored drives failed . . .do you 
need to break the RAID in order to use the non-failed one by itself 
or does the RAID just continue to operate in a degraded manner until 
you replace the dead drive.

4. For #3, if you moved the non-failed drive by itself to another 
Tiger system; does it show up there as a degraded RAID or as a single 
FW drive (i.e., is the RAID configuration stored on the FW drives 
themselves or on the system that built the RAID?

5. For home fileserver use . . .is it worth upgrading my Gray G4 with 
a FW800 card or is FW400 fast enough? My guess is that since I'm not 
doing video and my home network is only 100BaseT that 400 is plenty 
fast.

My goal is to make a mirrored (i.e., more reliable) data volume for 
my home fileserver. OWC has a 2 drive RAID in their Aluminum series; 
but for ease of replacement I would rather pay a couple more bucks to 
get completely separate drives if I can continue to operate with just 
one of them in case of a single failure.


-- 
===================================================================
Neil
There are only three kinds of stress . . .  your basic nuclear 
stress, cooking stress, and A$$hole stress. All of the three are 
related . . . the key is Jello.