Best RAID configuration for combining external thunderbolt enclosures?

I'm looking at configuring two external Western Digital Thunderbolt Duo drive enclosures using Disk Utility's software RAID setup tool. Each enclosure houses two 2TB drives. I'm looking to get the performance of RAID 0 striping with the redundancy of RAID 1 mirroring. What I'm not sure of, and I hope someone can shed some light on, is how to combine the RAID sets to achieve my desired goal. As I see it, there are two possible ways to go about this.
The first would be to configure the master RAID set as mirrored, with the individual thunderbolt enclosures configured as striped sets. Example:
The second approach would be to configure the master RAID set as striped, with the individual thunderbolt enclosures configured as mirrored set. Example:
Can anyone tell me which is the better way to go about this? Are there advantages/disadvantages to either approach? Thanks for any insight you might have!

Start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
see the heading Nested (hybrid) RAID
The issue with striped RAID is that loss of one drive is devastating. Lose one drive and you lose it ALL.
They advocate you make a striped set of Mirrored drives. One failure and you're fine, as long as you don't have another failure before you fix it.
NB> RAID is not Backup -- you still need a backup.

Similar Messages

Best Raid Configuration for a 8-1tb hhd server

Hi All,
I have been trying to figure out what would be the best raid configuration for my Windows 2012 essentials server. So I was wondering if I could get some advise on this. Here is what I would like to get out of this configuration.
I would like to split the 8-1tb drives into 2 VHD one with about 300gb for the OS to be installed on, and the rest to be use for storage. I want like to have good redundancy, fairly good read & write capabilities.
I will be using this server for a Small Web Page and Game Hosting, Email Exchange, Critical Application hosting.
I would like the ability to enlarge the overall raid storage by swapping out my 1Tb drives with 2Tb or larger as the need for more storage arises.
Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Thanks

You may be better of using Storage spaces and not using raid at all.
Robert Pearman SBS MVP
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What is the best RAID configuration for a MacPro as a Logic User?

There ought to be a universal answer to this question: what is the best RAID configuration for Logic Mac Pro users? I will be more specific.
I use Logic Studio, Reason, Ableton, and Motu Symphonic Instrument simultaneously.
I want to fail safe my precious audio files and improve performance as the system reads/writes data from multiple files, from audio tracks to digital samples.
I want to run video files simultaneously to do nifty audio soundtracking to video.
Here is the configuration I have in mind.
HD 1: OS and Logic Studio, Reason/Ableton samples etc. software (non-raid) (250 GB)
HD 2/3: MIrrored RAID set for AUDIO FILES (500 Gb identical pair)
HD 4: Video files / Bouncing (1 TB)
Makes sense right? A disk for reading software. A pair of 500 GB disks for reading/writing audio files and sessions in mirrored array. A 1 TB disk for video and bouncing. The main question I have is, for audio files only, is striped or mirrored better? 64K blocks the best? And are there any more details. I assume to do this in Disk Utility.

Well, both Mirrored and Striped have their pros and cons. If you use mirrored, it will offer no better performance than the spec'ed drive along with it's sata bus speed. The plus point is, if one drive goes down, you have the second as a backup as the complete contents of one drive are mirrored on the other.
With striped you will get a performance boost because all files (for example a single project) will get written across both drives and hence split the load on the drives and the SATA busses. The drawback is that you'll have to make sure you have a good, regular backup schedule in place because when one of the drives goes to drive heaven, you're going to be stuffed without a full backup of both drives.
Exactly what performance boost you'd get will depend on your project, number of files, size of files, fragmentation of files, track count etc. You may find it would be easier to use the 3 drives straight, with no raid and have:
HD 1: OS and Apps. No samples at all.
HD2: Audio Files for Logic projects
HD3: Reason, Ableton, Logic etc instrument sample library
HD4: Video and bouncing.
Which is what I ended up doing although I use HD4 as an interchangeable backup for HD1 and 2.
There is no universal answer to this as each must make their own choice based on their preferences and needs. Mirrored will give you full backup but on-site, in machine backup. Not much good if something untoward and drastic happens to the physical machine. I think a few people toy with striped RAID but fall on the side of using the drives straight, as in their projects they don't see a big enough gain over splitting the data across your 3 remaining drives without RAID. Studios that seriously consider raid often go out and get a dedicated raid that can offer more variations than raid 0 or raid 1 (Striped and Mirrored) and better throughput.
I hope this helps a little and not just added to the dilemma.

Best RAID configuration for storing Datafiles and Redo log files

Database version:10gR2
OS version: Solaris
Whis is the best RAID level for storing Datafiles and Redo log files?

Oracle recommends SAME - Stripe And Mirror Everything.
In the RAC Starter Kit documentation, they specifically recommend not using RAID5 for things like voting disk and so on.
SAN vendors otoh claims that their RAID5 implementations are as fast as RAID10. They do have these massive memory caches...
But I would rather err on the safer side. I usually insist on RAID10 - and for those databases that I do not have a vested interest in (other than as a DBA), and owners, developers and management accept RAID5, I put the lead pipe away and do not insist on having it my way. :-)

What is the best option today for an external DVD Drive self powered

I am planning to remove the internal DVD-ROM and use the MCE OptiBay to install a second SSD in RAID 0 configuration, what is the best option today for an external DV-ROM, ideally self powered via USB or Firewire ?, thanks

can't say I agree with the RAID 0, if that messes up or one drive dies, you lose it all. Not to mention, The SSDs made like that aren't made for RAIDs...
The ones that can are really expensive, high end stuff.
http://addonics.com/products/externalcd/pocketusib.asp
http://addonics.com/products/externalcd/pocketii.asp

Does latest version of bootcamp installed on late 2013 rMBP put thunderbolt drivers for lacie external thunderbolt/USB 3.0 drive?

does latest version of bootcamp installed on late 2013 rMBP put thunderbolt drivers for lacie external thunderbolt/USB 3.0 drive?
I am wiping my current windows bootcamp partition and reinstalling windows using disk utility /bootcamp wizard to clean up and reinstall.
just curious if the Thunderbolt drivers get installed from bootcamp/windows sofytware update as I can't remember iif i had to do it manually before. I do see it shows up on windows side in device manager and if it is pluggged in during boot screen (to windows 7 pro 64 bit) shows ASMedia drivers being loaded for it.
Thanks

thank you so much I was pretty sure it did but wanted to be 100% sure as purpose of clean install was to clean up some mishaps I did with office 2007 (custom install), etc.
Many Thanks

Best RAM configuration for Macbook (mid 2007)

Hi, I have a Macbook (mid 2007) with 1 GB ram and I would like to upgrade. Currently I have 2x512MB, so both of my memory slots are taken. Is it a good idea to have one 512MB card and a 2GB card in the other slot? Otherwise, what is the best RAM configuration for a mid 2007 macbook?
I am also looking into purchasing this memory card for my macbook, is this a good choice?
http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-2x1GB-200-Pin-667Mhz-SODIMM/dp/B000FQ2JLW/ref=sr_1 _3?ie=UTF8&qid=1307335802&sr=8-3
Any advice would be very much appreciated!

Kappy wrote:
In these early models, Ronda, the benefit is very marginal.
Yes, I read the figure 128 in regards to the benefit. Something about interleaving, maybe?
In doing a Google search for that article I saw, I found this:
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/apple-notebooks/99215-4gb-ram-my-macbook.html
the maximum amount of RAM your laptop can take is 3.3GB. So while you can physically insert 4GB of RAM, OS X will only be able to see 3.3GB of it.
But I don't know how knowledgeable that poster is who says it can utilize 3.3 GB. I do know that the full 4 GB shows up in the System Profiler on my MacBook Core 2 Duo 2.16 GHz.

RAID Configurations for Cisco servers

Hi All,
What is the RAID configuration for Cisco Appliance(Version 8.5) like CUCM, CUPS, CUIC, Unity etc?RAID Configuration will be done while installtion itself or we need to do it explicitly?
Regards,
Adithya

Hi Geoff,
Thanks for the reply. Just wanted to know whether if this RAID configuartion is similar to the other server RAID where we install Cisco applications.(Like OS & Application Software is RAID 1 and Database is RAID10).
Regards,
Adithya

SCOT configuration for internal & external email system in EP.

Hi,
I want to add SCOT configuration for internal & external email system in SAP EP 7.0 ?
What all steps I need to do ? any good documents on this ?

Hi Haider,
I have read the link you have given me to configure SCOT. I have 3 doubt plzz clarify.
Doubt No. 1:
In that link its mentioned that I have to add 2 profile parameter in the transaction RZ10 namely icm/server_port_<>* and is/SMTP/virt_host_<>*
My question is Can I put any value which i like in place of * like can I add either icm/server_port_2 OR icm/server_port_3 OR icm/server_port_4 in icm parameter AND ALSO
Can I put any value which i like in place of * in is/SMTP/virt parameter like can I add either is/SMTP/virt_host_0 OR is/SMTP/virt_host_1 OR is/SMTP/virt_host_2 .
Doubt No. 2:
What port value I have to put in the profile parameter    icm/server_port_2 in RZ10. Can I put any port value ? and automatically that port will work? say suppose I addded this profile parameter in RZ10
icm/server_port_2 = PROT=SMTP,PORT=25000,TIMEOUT=180          so automatically 25000 port will work ? or will it give error?
Doubt No. 3:
When I go to SMICM transaction and go to services , I get the following:
No. Log         Service name/port     Host name           Keep Alive    Proc TimeOut   Active
1     HTTP               8000                  epv.sopm.com           30                     60               Yes
2     SMTP               0                       epv.sopm.com            30                    60                Yes
3     HTTPS             8001                 epv.sopm.com            30                    180               Yes
This means that HTTP port is 8000,   HTTPS port is 8001. My question is why in SMTP its showing 0, why no port is shown?
I have not added any profile parameter like icm/server_port_2 = PROT=SMTP,PORT=25000,TIMEOUT=180     for SMTP in RZ10 as of now.
Is this the reason for this ?

Best practice RAID configuration for UCS C260 M2 for Unified Communications?

I have two UCS C260 M2 servers with 16 drives (PID: C260-BASE-2646) and I am trying to figure out what the best practice is for setting up the RAID.
I will be running CUCM, CUP, CUC, Prime, etc. for about 2000 phone environment.
If anyone can offer real world suggestions that would be great. I also have a redundnat server.

The RAID setup depends a bit on your specific configuration; however, there is a guide for Cisco Collaboration on Virtual Servers that you can review here:
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/virtual/CUCM_BK_CF3D71B4_00_cucm_virtual_servers/CUCM_BK_CF3D71B4_00_cucm_virtual_servers_chapter_010.html#CUCM_TK_C3AD2645_00
If your server is spec'd as a Tested Reference Configuration (TRC) then the C260M2 TRC1 would have 16 HDD that you would configure/split into 2 x 8HDD RAID 5 arrays.
Hailey
Please rate helpful posts!

Creating the best RAID setup for my MacPro using FCP

I have a MacPro, 2 x 3GHz Dual Core, 16GB ram, 4 x 500GB drives and I work in FCP 5.1.4 and with my Hardware setup I feel it should be faster and I've been wanting to set up a RAID but not sure how to do it, or the best way way to do it.
Out of the 4 drives I have, Drive one is my main drive (boot drive, apps etc.) Drives (2 & 3) which is a TB combined, I'd like to turn those into a RAID) to speed up rendering, editing etc. In FCP and Motion. Drive 4 is where I keep all my working files.
My files are backed up regularly onto external harddrives and kept offsite.
Can I leave everything I have on my entire system the way it is and just turn Drives 2 & 3 into a RAID that's best for this application? People who work in VIDEO I know do this all the time to speed things up but I can't find the steps for the best way to do this. Bits and pieces all over the place but I can't put this puzzle together.
Can you point me in the direction in how to do this?
As I'm doing this is there anything I should be careful about?
Please help me understand this process.
Just in case you need to know what kind of drives I have here's the info:
Capacity: 465.76 GB
Model: ST3500641AS P
Revision: 3.BTA
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk1
Bay Name: "Bay 1"
OS9 Drivers: No
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified
Volumes:
Startup Drive:
Capacity: 465.44 GB
Available: 367.86 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk1s2
Mount Point: /

My advice would be 'yes' to what you are saying... with the exception of the Softraid stuff - not that I think its wrong, but I've never used it, so I can't comment if you need it or whether the Mac OSX raid is sufficient - but others here say they prefer it so fair enough. You can see some comparisons here http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/softraid/351/
amug always have indepth benchmarks of stuff.
I wouldnt call myself an FCP guru, but I think that your suggestion of putting the FCP scratch disk and client, video files on the raid are the best idea. The scratch folder is essentially where the temp-rendered clips go, so its audio and video - you want that folder to be on a really fast volume. You also want your source video files to be on a really fast volume, so they can be streamed fast enough to play in realtime too when playing unrendered areas, or building a preview.
Some might say in FCP you get bast performance when your scratch disks and video files are on seperate disks. Thats totally true, so it can read from one disk and write to the other at the same time. But in your case you have a 3disk stripe, which is roughly 3x faster than either of your disks! So it would still be faster to have them all on the same stripe.
You can leave your FCP app on the sys drive, keeps things cleaner (drive1 for sys and appsm raid for data). You can keep your project files where ever you want, they're not very big and are kept in memory so dont affect performance at all. Though to stay clean I would keep it on the raid, so again the raid is for data, and you can back it up accordingly. The system drive is only for apps and system so you can back that up accordingly too (less frequently probably).
P.S. Technically your 'point 8' is inaccurate. After creating the raid you will not see drives 2,3 or 4. You will see only one 'volume' for all 3 drives. Overall your mac will have 2 'volumes': the system drive, and the stripe of 2,3,4. Physical drives and 'volumes' that mount in your OS are completely seperate. You can create multiple partitions in a single drive, or you can combine multiple drives into a single volume (e.g. using raid). But basically yes, you copy your client files back to the raid.
And remember, if any ONE of the disks in the stripe dies, you lose ALL of the data on the entire 1.5TB volume. So it is pretty important to backup regularly!!!!
(I dont wanna confuse you any more, but raid5 is a good option if you want more security and don't mind paying extra :P, you'll need more hardware for that, and more drives to make it worthwhile - but I would say skip that for now, as you can build your raid0 for free or almost free and use that until you think you need more)

Best Xserve configuration for MySQL?

Basically, I'm trying to figure out the optimal configuration for our next Xserve. Obviously, more RAM, more CPUs, more and faster disks in RAID, etc will improve things. But considering that money doesn't grow on trees, what have some of you found to be particularly cost-efficient in building an Xserve to run mainly MySQL where there are many small INSERTs on indexed (!? tables of 10 million or more rows (DB size of ~1GB, presently). I realize it's kind of a "depends if" type of question, but I'm just curious what people have found. (I've also read that AnandTech article that wasn't too kind to Mach.)
Anyway, I was thinking of an quad-core Xserve with 4-8GB of RAM, and a RAID5 set of 15K SAS drives. Well, there's not much in terms of options anyway. But this box will be like I said 90% running services that depend on MySQL performance. Some Web services, but mainly automated MySQL stuff.
Should I even bother to look at a Sun or Dell running Linux?
I'm presently running primarily an Xserve dual G5 2GHZ with MegaRAID in RAID5. As I said, the key database is about 1GB with ~10 million rows (mostly in just two tables). So, small data sets, already heavily indexed... Anyway, any thoughts are very welcome. Here is a status snapshot of the past couple days:
Traffic ø per hour
Received 1,168 MiB 21 MiB
Sent 1,631 MiB 29 MiB
Total 2,799 MiB 49 MiB
Connections ø per hour %
max. concurrent connections 92 --- ---
Failed attempts 0 0.00 0.00%
Aborted 81 1.43 0.08%
Total 98 k 1,731.89 100.00%
Total ø per hour ø per minute ø per second
6,409 k 113.27 k 1.89 k 31.46
Query type ø per hour %
admin commands 41 0.00 k 0.00%
alter db 0 0.00 0.00%
alter table 7 0.00 k 0.00%
analyze 3 0.00 k 0.00%
backup table 0 0.00 0.00%
begin 0 0.00 0.00%
call procedure 0 0.00 0.00%
change db 98 k 1,734.77 1.56%
change master 0 0.00 0.00%
check 0 0.00 0.00%
checksum 0 0.00 0.00%
commit 0 0.00 0.00%
create db 0 0.00 0.00%
create function 0 0.00 0.00%
create index 0 0.00 0.00%
create table 1 0.00 k 0.00%
create user 0 0.00 0.00%
delete 210 3.71 0.00%
delete multi 0 0.00 0.00%
do 0 0.00 0.00%
drop db 0 0.00 0.00%
drop function 0 0.00 0.00%
drop index 0 0.00 0.00%
drop table 1 0.00 k 0.00%
drop user 0 0.00 0.00%
flush 0 0.00 0.00%
grant 0 0.00 0.00%
ha close 0 0.00 0.00%
ha open 0 0.00 0.00%
ha read 0 0.00 0.00%
help 0 0.00 0.00%
insert 214 k 3,776.04 3.39%
insert select 5,725 101.18 0.09%
kill 6 0.00 k 0.00%
load 0 0.00 0.00%
load master data 0 0.00 0.00%
load master table 0 0.00 0.00%
lock tables 16 0.00 k 0.00%
optimize 0 0.00 0.00%
preload keys 0 0.00 0.00%
purge 0 0.00 0.00%
purge before date 0 0.00 0.00%
rename table 0 0.00 0.00%
repair 0 0.00 0.00%
replace 0 0.00 0.00%
replace select 0 0.00 0.00%
reset 0 0.00 0.00%
restore table 0 0.00 0.00%
revoke 0 0.00 0.00%
revoke all 0 0.00 0.00%
Query type ø per hour %
rollback 0 0.00 0.00%
savepoint 0 0.00 0.00%
select 941 k 16.64 k 14.92%
set option 855 15.11 0.01%
show binlog events 1 0.00 k 0.00%
show binlogs 43 0.00 k 0.00%
show charsets 121 2.14 0.00%
show collations 121 2.14 0.00%
show column types 0 0.00 0.00%
show create db 15 0.00 k 0.00%
show create table 376 6.64 0.01%
show databases 129 2.28 0.00%
show errors 0 0.00 0.00%
show fields 675 11.93 0.01%
show grants 46 0.00 k 0.00%
show innodb status 393 6.95 0.01%
show keys 37 0.00 k 0.00%
show logs 0 0.00 0.00%
show master status 0 0.00 0.00%
show ndb status 0 0.00 0.00%
show new master 0 0.00 0.00%
show open tables 1 0.00 k 0.00%
show privileges 0 0.00 0.00%
show processlist 18 0.00 k 0.00%
show slave hosts 0 0.00 0.00%
show slave status 0 0.00 0.00%
show status 415 7.33 0.01%
show storage engines 8 0.00 k 0.00%
show tables 186 3.29 0.00%
show triggers 0 0.00 0.00%
show variables 283 5.00 0.00%
show warnings 0 0.00 0.00%
slave start 0 0.00 0.00%
slave stop 0 0.00 0.00%
stmt close 0 0.00 0.00%
stmt execute 0 0.00 0.00%
stmt fetch 0 0.00 0.00%
stmt prepare 0 0.00 0.00%
stmt reset 0 0.00 0.00%
stmt send long data 0 0.00 0.00%
truncate 0 0.00 0.00%
unlock tables 16 0.00 k 0.00%
update 260 k 4,600.62 4.12%
update multi 0 0.00 0.00%
xa commit 0 0.00 0.00%
xa end 0 0.00 0.00%
xa prepare 0 0.00 0.00%
xa recover 0 0.00 0.00%
xa rollback 0 0.00 0.00%
xa start 0 0.00 0.00%
Begin
Variable Value Description
Flush_commands 1 The number of executed FLUSH statements.
Lastquerycost 0 The total cost of the last compiled query as computed by the query optimizer. Useful for comparing the cost of different query plans for the same query. The default value of 0 means that no query has been compiled yet.
Slow_queries 338 The number of queries that have taken more than longquerytime seconds.

RAID 5 is the worst possible storage option for databases.
That's not to say it won't work, but it has an overhead that will impact disk I/O, especially writes and it sounds like your data set is write-heavy.
This is because a write requires a Read-Modify-Write process for every write - whenever you write data to the array it has to read all the existing data in the corresponding blocks, recalculate the new parity data, then write it all back.
This may or may not be a problem for you, depending on actual quantity and scale of the writes, but if you're looking for the best configuration, RAID 5 is not it.
For optimal performance use RAID 0. Of course, RAID 0 has no protection, so you need to deal with that.
The ideal combination is RAID 0+1, but that requires a minimum of four drives, while the XServe can only handle three internal drives.
As for the rest of it, you really need to analyze your data more before you can get an answer.
The number of rows is largely irrelevant if you're just inserting data. It has some bearing on indexes, so you need to look at how your data is indexed.
As for memory, the ideal configuration is at least enough memory for MySQL to load all the indexes into RAM - most lookups should be indexed and if those indexes fit entirely within the memory space you're off to a good start.
Note that the standard MySQL is 32-bit, so you're limited to 2GB for InnoDB or MyISAM (whichever you're using). You'll need the 64-bit version to use more memory than that.
Most performance bottlenecks (and gains) can be traced to either indexes (too many indexes can be just as bad as not enough), and application (there's significant overhead in opening a new MySQL connection (which is a large factor in the AnandTech article), so try to ensure that your application uses connection pools (where a number of connections are opened when the app starts, and reused through application processes rather that a new connection opened for every query). Without knowing the application it's impossible to narrow that one down much more.
As for Sun or Dell - sure, they're options. Just be aware that you'll need Solaris or Linux admin skills in order to get the most out of them. They may (but not necessarily will) perform faster at the end of the day, but it may also take you much time and heartache to get there.
The other thing that you don't mention is why you're looking to upgrade. Is the G5 currently stressed? If so, where? what's the typical CPU load? disk activity level? network load, etc.
It doesn't make any sense upgrading the machine if the network is your bottleneck - all you're going to do is move that same bottleneck to a different machine.

Best Raid 0 for PS CS3 and Mac Pro

I am getting closer to ordering a new Mac Pro to run PS CS3 - and to drive 3 big Epson printers. I am leaning toward the dual-core 3.0 GHz as the results and speed for the 8 core with PS CS3 are still not known. It will have 6 to 8 GB of RAM (depends on my budget).
I want to make a machine that will do only PS CS3 - at the fastest possible rate. I have lots of other Macs for running other applications. I plan to order the Mac Pro with 1x 500MB hard drive - and add 2 smaller, but faster drives for the OS and for PS - and for the PS scratch/cache- and to put that on a Raid 0.
I am looking at getting 2 Raptor 150MB 10,000 RPM drives for the Raid 0. They can be small -maybe even just the 70MB versions -as I would only use them for booting OS and for running PS CS3. Images would be saved to a different disk. I have 10 external LaCie FW800 drives for image storage and backups. I will also use the 500MB drive that comes with the new Mac Pro for image storage - and maybe add a 4th similar 500 or 750MB drive for additional storage on the mac Pro itself.
My thought is that if I only have the OS and the PS on the Raid 0 a total failure would do little harm. I would not lose anything except maybe the image being worked on at the time of failure. The applications and OS could be rebuilt from the install CDs.
Is this a good plan? Is there another way to get maximum PS CS3 speed on the new Mac Pro?
Dual 2.7 G5, 2 intel iMacs, 1 MacBook, 1 Powerbook, 18 G4 Macs, 3 iPods Mac OS X (10.4.9) I teach Digital Photography clases - on Macs

Some considerations:
Ideally you want to use separate drives (or RAID volumes) for:
1. Mac OS X and Photoshop
2. Scratch space
3. Storage of images that you're processing
If you use a striped volume for the boot disk, then you'll have to keep another bootable disk to perform some firmware updates (firewire drives work well) - you'll want to do this anyway with a RAID 0...
Buy your RAM so that you can get the quad-channel performance...
If you are comfortable working inside the computer, you can also add a 5th/6th drive in the optical bay. To add one extra drive, you just need 5.25 drive mounting bracket. For two extra drives (or even 4) you can use this product:
http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_i d=158
I found that an 18" SATA cable with elbow connectors is the best... you'll also want a 6" SATA power adapter (4pin-15pin)
My suggestion would be to add a 5th hard drive to the Mac Pro. That way, you could use (1) 150 GB raptor as the boot/PS disk, and then created TWO striped RAIDs with the 4 remaining disks. Perhaps (2) raptors for a scratch stripe, and (2) disks for users/storage. If your storage needs are less than 300 GB, then get 5 raptors...
If your LF Epson printers are firewire, then you'll want each to be on it's own firewire bus - get additional PCIe firewire cards as needed.
All of the drive recommendations above assume that you're doing daily (or more often) backups of any RAID 0 stripes that you create...
EDIT:
On second thought, you might want to stripe the boot drive for better printing performance (waiting for OS to write to the spool)... so perhaps add a 6th internal SATA disk and have 3 unique 300 GB (striped) volumes.

Which RAID Configuration for my WD "My Book Mirror Edition"?

About to reformat my WD "My Book Mirror Edition" to use on my iMac. I hope to also install on my iMac "Virtual Box", "VM Fusion", or "Parallels" and then run a few windows products. Which RAID configuration should I choose in the WD "drive configurations" box?

If I were you I'd run any Virtual Machine directly on your iMac, not on a "WD My Book Mirror Edition", in particular not when connected through USB 2.0.
To store data, the WD is fine.
For the RAID options:
RAID 0 ("striping") : if you want something fast (insofar this is possible with a USB connection). Note that when one of your disks fails you can say goodbye to all your data.
RAID 1 ("mirroring"): more safe. If one disk fails, the data are recoverable as they are on the other disk as well. Disadvantage is you get only half the storage capacity compared to RAID 0.
Oh. my personal recommendation: RAID 1 is not an alternative to making a backup. So whatever option you choose: if you store valuable data on the disk that are nowehere else: back them up!
On formats:
HFS+ : definitely recommended if you only use the RAID array on the Mac.
FAT 32: if you also use it on a Windows machine. Note that files cannot be larger than 4 GB in this case.
Hope this helps.
Eric

The best RAID level for video editing that has some form of redundancy?

I've been asked to help find the best solution for importing and editing large amounts of HDV (25 Mbit/s) video. However, those whom I am helping also want a level of redundancy that will allow a single drive to fail and their data to be preserved. So what I'm trying to figure out is the best RAID level (or levels) for their need. I'm fairly certain that either 0+1 or 10 is what I'm looking for, however the I/O performance differences between 0+1 and 10 aren't quite clear to me. If someone could explain that to me I would appreciate it. Additionally, if someone knows a better level than either 0+1 or 10 for the needs I described, please don't hesitate to let me know.

The difference between RAID 10 and RAID 0+1 is how the array is created.
RAID 0+1 creates a RAID from multiple RAID 0 arrays that are mirrored.
You can tolerate any number of drive failures in any one side of the mirror (that side of the mirror goes offline as soon as any one disk fails, so it doesn't matter how many other disks fail in the same array), but one drive failure on both parts of the mirror will trash your data.
RAID 10 creates a stripe of multiple RAID 1 mirrors.
In this setup you create RAID 1 mirror sets and stripe them together.
In this setup you can tolerate one disk failure in each element of the stripe.
For example if you have 6 drives you might create three mirrors of two drives each, and each mirror is then striped.
You can lose one drive in each mirror, but if you lose two drives in any mirror set, you're out of luck.
In both cases, though, you're not going to get the best usage out of the array since mirroring has a 50% overhead - meaning you're only going to get 50% of your total disk capacity as usable space.
With the XServe RAID, the RAID 5 performance is very good - good enough for your 25MB/sec throughput so I'd go with RAID 5 arrays, not RAID 0 or 1 on the XServe RAID itself.
Then, depending on your space requirements, you can either stripe or mirror them together for a RAID 50 or 51 array. In this way you gain the data redundancy of RAID 5 with better disk utilization than 10 or 0+1.
RAID 50 will give you the best performance (and the most usable space), RAID 51 will give you the best redundancy.
At the end of the day it's up to you to decide which format to use based on performance and usable space requirements.

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