Partitioning a RAID 0

I want to get a hardware RAID enclosure eSATA and FW 800. I'm wondering if I can put bootable partions on it so I can CCC them to new hard drives that I put into refurbished machines?

Hardware RAID?

I don't understand the question.

Some sound advice .... forget RAID 0 in a professional environment.
If you want to get the biggest bang for the buck and still have RAID, go for RAID 5.

Cheers ... McBie

Depends on your motivation for using RAID. Redundancy may legitimately not be a concern. Striping does increase disk I/O, so I can think of some reasons to use RAID 0 vs JBOD.

RAID 0 is just adding the space from 2 disks together to create a single larger volume.
The critical thing here is the word " Single "
If one of the disks fails in a RAID0, you loose the complete volume, including the data on the other disk.

To me, that is not 'Redundancy ', hence my warning.

Cheers ... McBie

I'm well aware of how RAID works (I work in enterprise storage). Not all solutions require redundancy. For instance, a good example can be scratch disks used in video editing come rapidly to mind. RAID 0, in that case, would be superior to JBOD (simple spanning/concatenation).

RAID 0 stripes the physical disks, so reads/writes are performed on multiple spindles. This is faster than a spanned disk (JBOD), where you simply add the two disks together to make on virtual disk.

Absolutely agree with you, I was just pointing out the risk -_-
From the original post, It was not clear to me at all what the value of the data was that the OP was going to store on the volume.

Cheers ... McBie

Yea, I'm a bit dubious of the reasoning behind RAID0 for what sounds like a repository for disk images, but you never know it could just be spillover being re-utilized. For something like that I'd go RAID1 or RAID5 (or RAID6, assuming the hardware supported it and I wanted to survive a dual disk failure). For other things, I'd ponder RAID10.

McBie said:

I don't understand the question.

Some sound advice .... forget RAID 0 in a professional environment.
If you want to get the biggest bang for the buck and still have RAID, go for RAID 5.

Cheers ... McBie

Click to expand...

Well I'm under the impression that RAID 0 is the fastest transfer system of the RAIDS. So I want to use it to store all my DVD's and iTunes libraries plus bootable systems OSX 10.4.11, 10.5.8, 10.7.2 various ASD's. I also use Final Cut Pro. I'm doing this now on five internal and two external 2TB drives on my PPC G5 dual 2.7. I hope with a large RAID I could also plug it into my Mac Pro Quad 2.66 Nehalem and the MBP i7.

It is fast. However, you lose A DISK and your data's ALL gone.

Dysfunction said:

Hardware RAID?

Click to expand...

As you can see I'm trying to understand all this RAID stuff. What I mean by hardware RAID enclosure is I want one that has the selector switch to choose the RAID type from 0 to 5. I dont want to use the Disk Utility software RAID method so I can move it to other machines via eSATA or FW800.

If it's hardware based, it should just be presented as a disk and you should be able to carve it up however you want. I *think* you can with software based RAID, but I'm really not sure of that to be honest. That said, as long as you're aware of the fundamental risks you're taking with your data.. have at it!

RAID5 will be more fault tolerant, but it's a bit slower, and takes more physical storage to present the same disk space.

Dysfunction said:

If it's hardware based, it should just be presented as a disk and you should be able to carve it up however you want. I *think* you can with software based RAID, but I'm really not sure of that to be honest. That said, as long as you're aware of the fundamental risks you're taking with your data.. have at it!

RAID5 will be more fault tolerant, but it's a bit slower, and takes more physical storage to present the same disk space.

Click to expand...

I'm aware of the risk but I have enough drives to CCC the hot stuff in case of failure I've read of the risk of RAID's but is that on ones that run 24/7 mostly rendering?

Things that spin fail. Actually, they probably fail more often on spin-up then while they're constantly spinning.

Dysfunction said:

Things that spin fail. Actually, they probably fail more often on spin-up then while they're constantly spinning.

Click to expand...

Thanks for a clear answer to the spinning issue. I've had very little HDD failures mostly with the Maxtor units and Toshiba 2.5's. And I will do automatic CCC tasks on the critical files. Will DiskWarrior service the RAID 0 and can Drive Genius deal with repartitioning?