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Mac OS X and RAID

Almo

Masterblazer
Almo
Joined
Aug 30, 2005
Messages
6,846
Location
Montreal, Quebec
Hi!

I'm looking at getting a redundant backup. I already know that RAID doesn't protect against fires or theft. I'm just looking to deal with harddisk failure.

So I hear a NetGear NAS box is good:

http://www.buynetgear.ca/product.asp?sku=3809703

It's hot-swappable, and sounds like it will be easy to work with.

But my MacPro says I can hook up two interal disks and tell it they are a RAID-1 mirror system. My question is, if one of the disks fails using the OSX software RAID solution, will it be easy for me to put in a new drive and not lose any data?

I'm a programmer, so simplicity of use isn't terribly important to me. What's making the NAS look worrisome is the extra $350 I have to pay over the cost of the disks.

Any recommendations on this?
 
Almo said:
But my MacPro says I can hook up two interal disks and tell it they are a RAID-1 mirror system. My question is, if one of the disks fails using the OSX software RAID solution, will it be easy for me to put in a new drive and not lose any data?
Click to expand...

That's kinda what a RAID mirror does best.

Let's say you have a 500Gb drive, adding a second 500Gb drive as a mirror does nothing for your overall storage capacity. What it does do is provide you with a nearly exact duplicate of your 'original' drive. If one was to go titsup and you replaced it all the RAID would do is copy the information back to it then keep both updated as you used the computer.

You're only ever in trouble if something takes out both drives at the same time (catastrophic PSU failure is a favourite)
 
But my question is whether Mac OS X's implementation of RAID 1 works well. I've read in some places (that might be questionable) that it isn't very reliable.
 
While Mac OS X RAID is fine after it is set up and running, and you can recover from a failed drive, I find the main drawback is when one drive fails, you cannot replace the failed drive and expect it to rebuild. You would have to restart the RAID from scratch, which, of course, starts by erasing the drives... then clone your data back to the RAID.

Look up SoftRAID: http://www.softraid.com/index.html
It has a great feature set, notifications for problems or failures, live rebuilds or changes to RAID sets and no reformatting! This actually just recently saved my hide and I was able to be back up working in a matter of minutes.
 
Last edited:
Ok, I just got my 3 TB drives, and it looks like 10.5.7 will rebuild a RAID set without starting over. I made a 2disk raid, and pulled one out. I stuck a blank in, and I dragged it into the raid set in Disk Utility, and it's now rebuilding. The data is still visible as well, so it seems friendly.

But it's taking 4 hours to rebuild when there was only about a megabyte of info in there. Hehe. Looks like it's just doing a bit-for-bit copy.
 
BirdyBuddy said:
While Mac OS X RAID is fine after it is set up and running, and you can recover from a failed drive, I find the main drawback is when one drive fails, you cannot replace the failed drive and expect it to rebuild. You would have to restart the RAID from scratch, which, of course, starts by erasing the drives... then clone your data back to the RAID.

Look up SoftRAID: http://www.softraid.com/index.html
It has a great feature set, notifications for problems or failures, live rebuilds or changes to RAID sets and no reformatting! This actually just recently saved my hide and I was able to be back up working in a matter of minutes.
Click to expand...

I was going to respond, but this is spot on.

If you have hardware to spare, I suggest setting up a networked storage device using whatever raid tools for the choice of OS, and network mounting that with your OS X box.

I currently use a FreeBSD box with raided ZFS pools and share them via NFS. (you could use Samba for this, for example.)
 
Almo said:
Ok, I just got my 3 TB drives, and it looks like 10.5.7 will rebuild a RAID set without starting over. I made a 2disk raid, and pulled one out. I stuck a blank in, and I dragged it into the raid set in Disk Utility, and it's now rebuilding. The data is still visible as well, so it seems friendly.

But it's taking 4 hours to rebuild when there was only about a megabyte of info in there. Hehe. Looks like it's just doing a bit-for-bit copy.
Click to expand...

They've done improvements, then. Good on them, but that seems cumbersome.
 
Ducky said:
I was going to respond, but this is spot on.

If you have hardware to spare, I suggest setting up a networked storage device using whatever raid tools for the choice of OS, and network mounting that with your OS X box.

I currently use a FreeBSD box with raided ZFS pools and share them via NFS. (you could use Samba for this, for example.)
Click to expand...

The extra dough for the netbox was too much. I really wanted to be able to work within the current hardware. Incidentally, adding and removing drives to the MacPro is a cinch. They snap in to the connectors, so no wires to mess with.

I really am happy with the hardware I got for my $3000 CAD.
 
Almo said:
The extra dough for the netbox was too much. I really wanted to be able to work within the current hardware. Incidentally, adding and removing drives to the MacPro is a cinch. They snap in to the connectors, so no wires to mess with.

I really am happy with the hardware I got for my $3000 CAD.
Click to expand...

As you should be, it's a very nice set up.

I only suggested that if you happened to have a spare machine laying around. If it works for you, then that's the answer. (Which is a stance sometimes lost on this sub-forum.)
 
Ducky said:
As you should be, it's a very nice set up.

I only suggested that if you happened to have a spare machine laying around. If it works for you, then that's the answer. (Which is a stance sometimes lost on this sub-forum.)
Click to expand...

Absolutely. My spare machines are rather old and inefficient. I think the server I used (an old 800 MHz Win 2000 machine) blew our power bill out.

Once Trena upgrades from her G5 Mac, that may become such a server.
 
Almo said:
Absolutely. My spare machines are rather old and inefficient. I think the server I used (an old 800 MHz Win 2000 machine) blew our power bill out.

Once Trena upgrades from her G5 Mac, that may become such a server.
Click to expand...

PPC versions of linux builds are available that run great, or OS X can handle ZFS raid pools.

If that happens PM me. I have loads of ideas to help.
 
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