Firewire for Software RAID

[Thomas Baley]

MacOSX-admin at omnigroup.comI have been using a 1 TB Buffalo external  
drive in plain vanilla mirror mode for 500 GB effective storage and  
just love it. It is both USB and Firewire 400. I have only used the  
Firewire. It cost $279 on sale.

I just came back from Frye's (yes, we have them in Atlanta, too) and  
the 4 TB NAS, supporting RAID 0, 1, 5, & 10, is $1,799. The 2 TB  
model NAS was on sale for $799. That would save $200 buying two 2 TB  
units instead of the one 4 TB. Of course you wind up with eight  
physical drives instead of four. These are true NAS, running a flavor  
of Linux inside on 32 MB of its own memory, builtin iTunes server,  
and a USB plug for a printer or additional drive or a USB hub.

Seems like a great deal, if you need terabytes of storage.

Tom Baley

Thomas R. Baley
tbaley at mac.com
770-984-8655
404-529-4710 f


On Dec 14, 2007, at 9:37 PM, Mike Friedman wrote:

On Dec 14, 2007, at 5:16 PM, Daniel Hazelbaker wrote:

> I don't know if it helps, but we have tried 3 different models of  
> firewire drives on our main file server and all were unstable, even  
> without RAID.  By unstable I mean they would randomly "lock up" and  
> we would have to unplug it and then re-plug it back in.  We did try  
> Software RAID with firewire  once and after rebuilding the array 4  
> times in as many months we gave up and bought a nice hardware raid  
> box.  You can actually get some pretty cheap ones now that just  
> have 2 drive that are hardware based mirroring.
>
> Daniel
>
> On Dec 14, 2007, at 4:16 PM, Mike Friedman wrote:
>
>> A client of mine is using a G5 iMac as their server (done long  
>> before I entered the picture) and has no RAID running on the silly  
>> thing. Obviously this is a problem. Are any of you using a  
>> Firewire disk for a RAID 1 mirror?  Their needs are pretty simple,  
>> but I want them to have some redundancy built in.
>>
>>


That's an extremely good idea, I think I will suggest that to them  
instead of replacing the iMac. In fact, I may do this for my own iMac  
based server which I tried Software RAID on a couple of times and it  
was a huge mess. Thanks for the suggestion.

=======================
Mike Friedman
MGF Consulting
Computers without Attitude
http://www.mgfconsulting.net
415-648-6560 (office)
415-823-9990 (mobile)
Yahoo Messenger/AIM: sfmike64



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