To Raid Or Not To Raid Options

[bradondc]

I have nearly maxed out my internal hard drive on my mac book, so i'm looking for a new harddrive. Should I be woried aout getting one with raid built in suh as the lacie little bug disk or the maxtor one touch iii turbo raid? Or will just having 7200 rpm be okay? I have had disk errors in garageband and get the occasional 'here are to many tracks' warnings with the internal drive. Also, if i got a hub and linked up 2 hard drives would i then be able to use the software raid in osX? Thanks for your time cheers

[lepetitmartien]

First thing: have a few gig free, it's important! You need space on the drive for the virtual memory and for the filesystem to do its stuff, not enough room means slower system and eventual crash.

Well, in fact you should not have use the internal drive for audio anyway… you're slowing down your computer this way. You don't necessarily need something like the big disk, a normal firewire/IDE drive will give you plenty of tracks to play/record (in the 40-50 at least on firewire 400) so it'll be enough.

To choose a big disk enables you to have more tracks but the risk of failure is a square multiply. so it's not a good idea for reliability save if you back up a lot. Given the price, you're better of with 2 different drives, one you work with, the second you back up to Given the price of the drives right now, it's a way better option.

A 7200 rpm for the internal drive will:
- heat more
- use more power so less battery time if it's something you care about
- a faaaster drive, making the system snappier
- won't be way better for the track count when using the internal drive for audio
- will be way better for the swap file of the virtual memory
- 2.5" HD are pricy, don't spend your money on gigs you don't need
- anyway, if it's not already done, max out your RAM. It'll be the best for OS X, less virtual memory used, so a system/the apps more efficient and a little less need of the hard drive in the day to day use.

So, to sum up things:
- max out ram if it's not already done
- eventually change the internal HD if heat/consumming is not an issue but don't go for the largest, it'll be anyway for system/apps/non audio files.
- Anyway, turn ON journaling on the system drive, it's good in case of crash. I'm sure you turn it off… (it'll slow you if you use the drive for audio, it's important for the system drive though, not much for others)
- buy one or 2 FW drives, work drive and back up drive (ideally)

Another thing… when using IDE drives, don't power them on and off all the time, it's the killing path in IDE.