[X4U] RAID on Tiger

[Thomas Bulat]

I am using a few FW Mirrored RAID setups with external devices.

>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.
Yes you can do FW drives. Just be sure they don't loose power or
connection via loose cable connections. Some modern external drives are
prone to having their cables pulled out easily, and that isn't a nice
thing to do to a RAID!
>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?
Yes it will notify (preference item on the setup pain I think), although
it's not very dramatic about it. I have overlooked that in the past and
ended up with a spot of trouble.
>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.
In theory, no, but I found it easier and more reliable to build it back
up fresh. Get ready to have extra disks available for backups and as
holding units. 
>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?
I think it will show up as a single useable unit. Might show up as a
broken mirror in Disk Utility. Can't remember for sure.
>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.
Currently using 400 until the prices drop more and variety increases for 800.

So long for now, TOM