Mac office network

I have a number of mac at my office.

I want to network them all and have them write to a raid 1 server.

One of the macs will be the dedicated server. Now my questions are: will I create a raid 1 matrix with two external drives connected via usb or do i invest in internal hard disk drives.

Is there any shortcoming if the server is running on a 32bit computer when the work stations are running on 64bit?


Thanks in advance

Will the "Server" be a Mac running OS X Server? Or will the "Server" be a NAS with two mirrored drives?

Or will it be Windows or a Frankenix concoction.

Either way:

I would not mirror two USB drives. I would buy a device that does hardware RAID like a Drobo or Promise device.
This will give you a RAID 1 share not server (unless you get a RAID device that has NAS capability).

If you want a Mac to be the "Server" only two models have the option for multiple internal drives. A Mac Pro and Mac Mini server. (disco-ed Xserves too)

What is more important than RAID 1 is a good backup. Unless you constantly monitor the RAID you will never know when one drive fails anyway. A RAID is slower than single drive and the redundancy RAID 1 provides will not ever bear the fruit most expect since a drive failure is only the beginning of the problem.

DO NOT MIRROR USB DRIVES!!!