On 30 Aug 2014, at 12:01 , Dinse, Gregg (NIH/NIEHS) [C] <di...@niehs.nih.gov> wrote:
> Hi, > > I have a 2012 Mac Pro tower (with 4 drive bays), running MacOSX 10.9.4 (the > latest version of Mavericks). > > Can I use Apple's Disk Utility to create a RAID10 disk array? > > That is, could I put 4 equal-sized hard drives in the Mac Pro tower and then > use Disk Utility to create a RAID10 setup, which is a stripe of mirrors? I don't think so. If I recall correctly, DU does either Raid0 or Raid1, but not Raid10. However, since a RAID10 is just a RAID1 of a RAID0 out's quite possible that you can first create the RAID0 and then create the RAID1 You will need 5 drives total (4 for the RAID and a boot drive). Erase the 4 drives, pair two of them into a raid0 (Pretty sure OS X calls it a Mirror and doesn't use "RAID0"), then create the striped array. If it lets you create the striped array, then you are good to go. > If this is possible, should it be nearly as good as a commercial software > RAID solution, as long as I am happy with RAID10 and do not care about RAID5 > or RAID6? I've never had an issue with the OS X softRAID, but I've only used it off and on since I got my firs MacPro1,1. > I know that Disk Utility does RAID0 and RAID1, but I do not know whether it > can be used to combine those software RAIDs. > > For example, suppose my 4 hard drives are named Disk1, Disk2, Disk3, and > Disk4. I was wondering if I could use Disk Utility to combine Disk1 and > Disk2 (via RAID1) into Mirror1, and likewise combine Disk3 and Disk4 (via > RAID1) into Mirror2, and then combine Mirror1 and Mirror2 (via RAID0) into > StripedDisk. In particular, if all disks are 3 TB, then I was hoping to end > up with a 6-TB RAID10 disk array, which would be a stripe of two 3-TB mirrors. The drives have to be identical in size. This means same model and manufacturer, probably. > If this is possible, would you trust it? I don't know why not, but I would never sacrifice that much disk space just for redundancy. > I figure all disks must be the same size, but do they have to be identical? > In my case, they would all be Seagates and all have the same nominal sizes > and speeds, but the exact models (and therefore exact sizes to the byte) > might differ. If I am remembering correctly, I could not create a RAID with drive that differed in size by less that 100MB, but that was a long time ago. -- Be careful what you wish for. You never know who will be listening. Or what, for that matter. _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list MacOSX-talk@omnigroup.com http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
