Mac OS X forum: RAID

Thanks for the response.

Are yo saying the only way to restore the two drives is to reinstall the OS?

If so, then why not leave it as it is. If this is RAID 1 then you have a 'certain' amount of protection if one of the drives fails.

If it is not working anyway, then you have lost nothing.

I agree with Jimmy about RAID 0. It is not for the faint hearted. I've used it and I was always nervous that one of the drives would fail. If it had, then everything went without chance of recovery.

Mark

If you want RAID 0, then yes, this would have to be done prior to installing the OS, because Disk Utility is going to wipe both drives clean in making the array.

Just be sure you have some sort of a backup in case one drive ever craps out, and remember that you won't be able to get back up and running until you replace that drive AND reinstall the OS to recreate the array. IMO, it's just not worth it when you can just separate what gets stored where. Like I have 2x2TB drives, and one is used for stuff I capture off my DVR and plan to delete after watching, and then I have another one where I store stuff I plan to keep longer term. It also has rips of my DVDs for streaming over my LAN. I briefly flirted with the idea of RAID 0, and just dumping everything into that, but then I thought about what would happen if one of the drives went bad. I'd lose everything as opposed to just one or the other. This way I may lose my archive or my current stuff, but it's highly unlikely I'd lose both at the same time.

Thabnks again for your input.

My question remains: Is there a way to restore the two drives from RAID without having to reinstall my system software?

No. The closest you could come is having a disk image of the array, but if one drive failed, you'd still need to recreate the array before you could restore that disk image. There's no fault tolerance of any kind in RAID 0. One drive craps out, it MUST be replaced and everything reinstalled. Even using a disk image, you would have to recreate the array before laying it down or the results would be unpredictable, but probably unpleasant. You want any kind of fault tolerance, then RAID 1 is the best you can do on a Mini unless you buy some kind of external drive rack.

One other thing that came to mind, is Apple's software RAID controller can be a little buggy at times. One time at work, had a Mac Mini Server in with the 2x500GB drives set up as a 1TB RAID 0 array, and no matter what I did, the stupid thing refused to let me delete the array so I could restore the OS. Ultimately had to rip the thing apart, physically disconnect one of the drives from the MLB, then boot up the installer again so I could access Disk Utility, format the still connected drive, then essentially rinse and repeat with the other drive now that the array had been forcefully broken. It may be a rare occurrence, but it's REALLY annoying when it does happen.