I am in the middle of adjusting my Mac and Mac OS Server to a more future proof setting. Having a bit of dilemma here, can't choose between if I should RAID or I should Clone - or if it's even possible to RAID in the way I want to? Look at this: This is the initial plan for my main Mac. It has 2x 240GB SSDs and 1TB external HDD. Thinking of RAID1 the SSDs and use the 1TB as TimeMachine. Benefits will be continues data replicas with better read speeds as a bonus, without the need to schedule a specific time to clone the drives, it just automatically runs in the background. Another way of doing essentially the same is this: I will loose the speed benefits of RAID0, I have to setup a program like CCC to run my cloning on a specific time of day but I will be secured from any RAID corruption as what can occur with software based RAIDs. Almost the same happens with my server that have two 2TB drives (which will be partitioned as 2x1.5) and one 3TB drive. On top of that It runs from a 64GB SSD with a 64GB USB stick and a 500GB external as backup for the OS part. Is it possible to make a combined RAID0 and use that as one half of a RAD1? or For short, what is the best solutions - A1, B1, A2, B2?
Do you have benchmarks on your hardware that a software Raid 1 solution is faster than using a single drive? I would expect a performance hit not a gain. I would go with B2 over A2 and use CCC or similar. I think any performance gains (if any!) from Raid 1 are not worth worrying about. Another option is to treat the 2nd SSD as another TimeMachine target. You lose the 'bootable backup' but gain from only having one backup routine to manage. How much do you want to protect against a drive failure vs the OS restore time? As to the server. Even if a stacked Raid option is technically possible I would run away from that option as fast as you possibly can. Keep it simple and focus on ease of setup, ease of management and ease of verifying everything is working okay. I would look at the most basic options first.
New ideas: The server have four internal drives and one external consisting of: 2x2TB Hitachi 5K3000 1x3TB Hitachi 5K3000 1x64GB Plextor M3 SSD 1x64GB External Integral Xcel flash pen To utilise all avaliable space in the best possible way (an most secure) I am thinking about doing like so: Partition the 2x2TB drives into 2x500GB RAID1 + 2x1.5TB RAID0 The content of the RAID0 is daily cloned at 16:00 and 04:00 to the 1x3TB drive The 2x500GB RAID1 is used as hourly TimeMachine for the 64GB SSD The 64GB SSD is also cloned at 04:00 to the 64GB external pen (one time a day is good enough as the RAID1 is a backup in itself) ----------------------- The everyday Mac have two internal SSDs and one external HDD consisting of: 2x240GB Intel 520Series SSDs 1x1TB WD My Passport Studio FW800 To utilise all avaliable space in the best possible way (an most secure) I am thinking about doing like so: Partition the 1x1TB external drive into three, one 500GB part as hourly TimeMachine, one 250GB as daily clone at 21:00 and one 250 as free external space (for large files I am working on). The two internal SSDs will then be setup in RAID1 to lower the risk of drive failures (I know it's not a good idea to have both TM and clone on one drive, so that's why I want to RAID1 and not RAID0 them). What do you say, better??
