RAID 0 on a Mac Pro?

[Feek]

At the moment I have three x 1Tb drives in my early 2008 Mac Pro, one of them has my home folder including all my iTunes files except my movies, the second has just my movies and the third is used for Time Machine.

As you can see, 2 x 1Tb drives into 1 x 1 Tb drive isn't going to work and the Time Machine drive is nearly full.

Next week I'm going to pick up a 2Tb Time Capsule for my Time Machine backups which will do me nicely. It also means a bit extra peace of mind because the backup drive won't be in the actual system.

I wonder if it's possible for me to combine two of my 1Tb drives into a single RAID 0 array to give me a single volume of 2Tb which will then be backed up to my Time Capsule? Can my Mac Pro do this?

A quick bit of thinking also suggests that perhaps I could set up the three drives into RAID 5 which will give me a single 2Tb volume with striping. That may be a better option.

Are these options available without extra hardware?

 

[Maccy]

Don't you need a RAID card if you're combining more than 2 drives? Or am I just thinking incorrectly?!

 

[Vonhelmet]

Googling suggests that you can use Disk Utility to set up RAID 0, 1 or JBOD.

If you want RAID 5, you'll need a RAID card. Apple will sell you a Mac Pro RAID card for £560. Ho ho ho. I've not looked further to see whether you can buy an off-brand alternative card that will do the job.

 

[Spyhop]

Yep - you can definitely do software RAID 0.

 

[dannyraul]

I am using x2 1TB drives in Raid 0 for my TM, these will be replaced with x2 2TB drives in Raid 1 when the prices come down. The 2TB Time Capsule is a rip off.

 

[Feek]

I'm not sure it is really, the 2Tb drives are currently very expensive so I really don't have a problem paying £336 for a 2Tb Time Capsule, that's about £200 more than an Airport Extreme. The drives are about £170 at the moment.

Good to know I can do what I want with the drives.

 

[bigredshark]

Googling suggests that you can use Disk Utility to set up RAID 0, 1 or JBOD.

If you want RAID 5, you'll need a RAID card. Apple will sell you a Mac Pro RAID card for £560. Ho ho ho. I've not looked further to see whether you can buy an off-brand alternative card that will do the job.

It's not actually a terrible price, it's SAS compatible too so you can use high performance disks if you need to. It's functionally comparable to something like the HP Smartarray P600 controller and comes in at a broadly similar price point.

It's not a cheap adaptec SATA RAID card like gamers shove in their desktops, so it's not priced like one.

 

[bigredshark]

I'm not sure it is really, the 2Tb drives are currently very expensive so I really don't have a problem paying £336 for a 2Tb Time Capsule, that's about £200 more than an Airport Extreme. The drives are about £170 at the moment.

Good to know I can do what I want with the drives.

Be interested to hear how you get on, software RAID isn't something I'm a big fan of but I've never tried apple's implementation to see what performance is like...