Ziggy587 wrote:samsonlonghair wrote:Thanks for your words gentlemen. I'm going to utilize a Scratch disk based on your recommendations. Now I'm looking into a RAID configuration. I found another 250GB hard drive. I'm planning to stripe both drives together in a RAID 0 plan to maximize space, speed and performance.
I don't know man, RAID 0 and spanned volumes are risky. Unless you have a backup solution in place, you'd be doubling your risk of data loss. Unless you mean you plan to RAID 0 the two drives and use them solely as a scratch (junk) drive, then you wouldn't have to worry about data loss.
Exactly. I'm going to RAID 0 the two drives just to make a larger scratch drive. No important files will be kept on scratch.
This should speed up read/write access to scratch. I suppose that the theoretical maximum factor would be double speed increase in a situation where the data is always distributed perfectly evenly across both disks, but real-world factors may slow this down. I guess I'll find out when I get to work.
Looks like the OSX disk utility with the GUI cannot build RAID arrays anymore. Odd. I could have sworn that function was built in on earlier versions. Looks like I'm going to need to utilize the terminal to run diskutil.
I do take the risk of data loss seriously. My primary archive stretches from 2002 'till today. I have backed up my archive in three different locations. Some time in the future, I'm going to be able to afford to backup my archive online via Amazon Glacier or a similar service.