Firewire Drives & mirroring

I use Lacie drives, both 400 & 800 at our office for backups and storage, but I will be using this for audio/video editing at home on my personal system. I am leaning towards buying (2) 1 TB drives. On one of Callbox's DVDs and they recommended using 2 drives and using Apple's disc utility to mirror the drives. Is this going to be fast enough for DVCPro50, uncompressed SD & DVCProHD editing? I've used one drive before to do this, so the drives are fast enough to support various formats even compressed HD formats, but will mirroring them slow down my realtime limits? I just want to make sure I have redundency with my at home work.
Any thoughts?

If you're talking about creating a RAID from two FW 800 drives, well, I don't think I'd recommend that (or even if it's possible as suggested). If you want a RAIDed set of drives, you could just buy two TB internal drives and RAID them internally. There are also eSATA enclosures you can get provided you have an eSATA PCI card installed.
Two FW800 drives will have to share the same bus, so I don't think you'd get any kind of extra speed.
FW 800 is fast enough to handle DV 50 and I've gotten away with cutting DVCProHD on it, but it's not fast enough for Uncompressed SD.
Since you're thinking about Lacie drives, I'm thinking that you are considering economy over reliability so I'd suggest buying 2 TB internals and creating a simple mirrored RAID from that (it's the cheap RAID solution). Then you'll be able to handle all the formats you listed plus more.
Andy

Similar Messages

  • Disk utility Q: setting up RAID with 2 firewire drives

    Hi,
    I tried setting up a redundant RAID with two LaCie 250gb firewire drives in Apple's Disk Utility. All was OK until I restarted. The RAID didn't show up, and both disks came up as unreadable. I was unable to reformat, erase, repair, or partition either of the LaCie drives. I tried new cables and both the front and rear Firewire ports. No matter what I did, I got an input/output error.
    I was able to erase and reformat one of the drives on my powerbook running 4.6. The other drive appears to be DOA, as it clicks and blinks and does little else.
    So what gives? I'm going to exchange the dead drive, but I don't want to have the same problem with setting up a RAID if the same nonsense is going to happen again. Any thoughts?

    FW RAID on G5s is PITA and very poor performance. You would also need a PCI FW800 controller to get a boost or anything like normal. If you want any type of RAID, invest in Serial ATA drive/case/controller.
    SeriTek if you want it to be bootable. SeriTek or Sonnet for direct connect. Sonnet if you think you might need more than 4 drives and use Port Multiplier.
    There is only one FW channel that has to be shared if you don't invest in one or more FW800 controllers.
    My bet is the drive could be fine but needs to be zeroed and could have damaged boot blocks at this point.
    I am not a fan of mirrors. Backups, yes, lots. Stripped for scratch and even a dedicated boot OS/apps, yes. I've run with Disk Utility and SoftRAID (3.5) for 4 yrs now but mostly SCSI and one FW800 RAID which only gets about 75-80MB/sec. Even a single drive gets near 60MB/sec and a mirror would cut that in half.

  • 2 External drives Mirroring

    Hi
    I have two lacie firewire drives (1 x 160 gb and 1 x 250 gb) Is it possible to put data on to one device and then for it to mirror automatically on to the other for safety and backup reasons. Im using them to record audio files on to.
    Thanks for any assistance
    Jonathan Spall

    Hi Jonathan;
    RAID 1 or mirroring is not a good backup method. The primary purpose for RAID 1 if properly configured is for protection from failure of a hard drive.
    Let me try and explain why I say it is not a good backup method. Let us say you are using an application and it aborts. As the application goes down, it takes all of the files with it. So now all of the files you were working are lost. Because of the nature of RAID 1, they are gone on both disks. How can you recover them? You can't. That is the reason why backups are still required with RAID 1.
    To top it all off, if you create a RAID 1 array with the two disks you have you will end up with 160 GB in the array. The additional 90 GB on the 250 GB drive would be lost.
    Allan

  • What's best - Xserve, have  4 drives, mirror... stripe?

    Hi all
    A friend has ordered a new Xserve, which comes with an 80Gb drive.
    He's also ordered 3 x 500Gb drive modules.
    What is the best way to set-up the Xserve?
    My friend does design and makes up pages in Quark 6 with Photoshop .eps files linked. All his images are hires.
    He makes pdf's hi and lores versions.
    He currently has retrospect backing up his current server (OS Server and firewire drives), which could be used to back up his new server, the machines are in different rooms.
    Is striping 2/3 of the drives better than mirroring ??
    Any help appreciated.
    wilse

    There is no 'best' answer to this question. The answer depends on many factors that no one other than the ultimate user can know.
    For example, striping and mirroring provide two very different benefits.
    Mirroring maintains all data on two or more drives so that if one drive fails, you can still keep running.
    Striping spreads data across multiple drives for increased speed, but offers no redundancy (lose one drive, lose them all).
    Mirroring will result in a final volume size equal to the smallest drive in the mirror (e.g., mirroring two 500GB drive results in a 500GB volume).
    Striping results in a final volume equal to the sum of its parts (striping two 500GB drives will result in a 1TB volume).
    You need to determine whether the increased space and speed of a striped volume is more or less valuable to you than the data protection offered by mirroring.
    You'll also need to take into account how much data you're trying to store - if you have 800GB of data then a mirrored volume isn't going to cut it anyway.
    For his workflow you might find the performance of a stripe to be beneficial, even if you don't need all the space, but you will need to be aware than a failure of any drive in the stripe will render the entire volume useless.
    Finally, consider how much time (and money) it will cost to restore a failed system. If a disk failure brings you down for 8 hours and you're charging clients $200/hr, then you might opt for the mirrored option on a cost-benefit analysis (a failed drive in a mirror should result in zero downtime, letting you replace the drive when its convenient for you).
    You (or your friend) need to weigh the factors to decide what's best.

  • How to install tiger on external firewire drive

    I'd like to upgrade my dual 2GHz Power PC G5 to 10.5, but I need access to OS9 from time to time. To solve this I wanted to install 10.4 with OS9 on my external HDD. I partitioned my Western Digital drive (connected by FW800) and installed 10.4 from the install disk. However, when I select it as the startup disk, the startup fails to identify the disk and starts from the internal drive.
    I tried to follow instructions from an old post, but one thing that was different was that when partitioning my harddrive, I did not have the option for GUID, I just had the option for Apple Partion Map. Oddly, now that I installed OSX 10.4, the option for GUID appears, but still seams incorrect since I'm on a G5 CPU.
    Any ideas why I can't boot from the external drive? Any suggestions on how to install OS9 and migrate my user folders over when I get it working?
    Thanks,
    Marcus

    Many Western Digital firewire drives will not boot a PPC mac. From this WD support page:
    http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/stdadp.php?pfaqid=1787
    The following external hard drives are not bootable on Power PC based Macintosh computers systems through USB/FireWire 1394(a/b):
    * My Book Essential Edition
    * My Book Essential Edition 2.0
    * My Book Home Edition
    * My Book Mirror Edition
    * My Book Office Edition
    * My Book Premium Edition II
    * My Book Pro Edition II
    * My Book Studio Edition
    * My Book Studio Edition II
    * My Passport Studio
    * My Passport Elite
    * My Passport Essential
    * WD Passport
    * WD Passport (Silver)
    If your drive is new and on the list, I would try to return it and get a different brand.

  • Partitioning an external Firewire drive

    Hi,
    I'm trying to partition an external 150gb Lacie Firewire drive with the Disk Utility under OSX10.3.9 and I've gone through the Erase procedure and DU is telling me I'm left with 149.1gb after formatting.
    So now under the partition tab I'm trying to set out the size of each partition and I know these sizes are gonna sound a bit random but bear with me so I want :-
    3 partitions of 10gb = 30gb
    6 partitions of 8gb = 48gb
    1 partition of 71.1gb
    After setting, naming and locking the first 9 partitions, when I get to the final partition, which I want to be 71.1gb, DU won't let me set a figure above 16.81gb.
    Now I fully appreciate that disk sizes are, to a degree, 'approximate', that after formatting you do 'lose' a few gb's and that each partition will have a filesystem installed on it but where the heck am I losing 54.29gb of storage space from ?!!
    I have experimented with fewer partitions and, to be fair, it seems you lose less space with less partitions but is it really the filesystems on each partition eating up that space ?
    I'm using HFS+ (journalled).
    Many thanks for any help you can give as this has been a real headache today !
    Nick

    Hi roam,
    Many thanks for your continued input into this thread and my apologises for the delay in replying to your last post.
    Anyway, I thought I'd give SuperDuper a go and downloaded v2.1.4 as you suggested and must agree that it's very simple to use. The backup took twice as long as my old way of backing up (restoring from the internal drive to the external drive) and I checked the log file for any errors and there weren't any, so all good there.
    I again restarted with the option key held down and yet again I'm only ever presented with one drive icon to boot from, not two, so I'm really not sure why this is happening.
    However, I've been giving this quite a lot of thought and I've come to the conclusion that if my internal system drive was to suffer a catostrophic failure (I'm touching loads of MDF here as I type that !!) and the drive is either wiped clean or damaged to the point that I replace it, I wouldn't be booting from my Firewire drive anyway, I'd be restoring from it, so I'd insert my install CD and reboot whilst holding down C, I'd then run Disk Utility and restore from my Firewire drive to the new internal drive.
    So what I really want is a mirror image of my internal drive which is what my method of restoring via the restore route gives me.
    Is that a correct hypothosis of have I missed something ?
    Nick

  • Cannot create vault on FireWire drive

    I have a FireWire drive with two partitions. One partition is a mirror running under SoftRAID. The other is an ordinary Mac partition. Aperture will not create a vault on the Mac partition, generating an error message saying that Aperture cannot create a vault on a networked drive. It says that it will only work on local drives or those connected by FireWire or USB. But this drive is connected by FireWire. Is this some sort of strange incompatibility with drives partitioned by SoftRAID?

    I have two valuts, both are on external FireWire drives (as is my library). Neither of these is attached to any kind of RAID array. My guess is that SoftRAID is causing your problem.
    Have you tried "unRAIDing" the drive to see if it will create then? or attaching a different disk and trying that?

  • Macbook causes external firewire drive to operate constantly

    I have a Macbook 1.83MHz with 2GB of RAM installed. Whenever I connect my 80GB LaCie external firewire drive, the drive commenses to do a rapid cycle as if I were copying a large file to it and does not stop for the duration of being attached to the computer. Searching through files on the hard drive is very slow, and if I click on a file in column view, the finder beachballs for several minutes while the info or preview is being generated. The drive is the only device in the chain and worked great with my previous machine, a dual 867MHz G4 mirror drive.
    Any thoughts as to what might be going on? Thanks.

    well, i attached my other firewire drive and it started doing the same thing, but i was able to add it to spotlight's "ignore" list and the problem went away. so this is probably the issue, but i can't make it stop on the original firewire drive because whenever i try to add it to spotlight's ignore list, the beachball spins for a few seconds then nothing shows up in the list.
    checked firmware, everything up to date. next step is to reformat...
    too bad spotlight doesn't default to NOT indexing everything you stick into the computer... (or at least dump indexing way back in the priority queue so it doesn't get in the way like this)

  • Firewire drives on laptop

    Hello,
    I'm about a week into a project and I've already had a 250gb firewire drive die on me (at least it didn't happen at 'crunch' time)...
    Firewire hookup seems to be my only option since the project is on a laptop...but lots of differing views on sizes,formatting abound. We're going to have about 60hrs of mini-dv 24pa ftg, we have 1 250gb firewire (Lacie-D2 triple interface) drive that still works (and very little $). Would anyone out there recommend getting 1 more 500Gb,2 more 250gb or some sort of Raid array set-up? What's the most cost-efficient and headache free?

    File under more than you ever needed to know ...
    What is Raid?
    Defined as a Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or independent) Devices (or Drives), raid systems are a collection of two or more drives that are configured to interact with each other in a variety of ways. The way they are configured is called the RAID LEVEL.
    Below is a quick list of the three relevant levels for video editing. There are many many more, but those only make sense in large corporate server applications.
    Raid 0 - the writing of files is split between the drives. if you have 2 160gb drives, you have a 320gb array. This is by far the most common application.
    Pro. Very fast since each write head is only doing a percentage of the work.
    Con - If either disk fails, all data is lost.
    Raid 1 - the writing of the files is mirrored (duplicated) on each drive. if you have 2 160gb drives, you have a 160gb array.
    Pro - data is secure, if either drive dies, you have lost nothing. Simple to implement.
    Con - slower writes- data must be written twice, but reads happen at normal speed.
    Raid 5 - the writing of data to the disks is spread over all disks as is the parity checking. If an individual disk fails, the system should be able to rebuild it from the information on the other disks. If you have 2 160gb drives, you have a 320gb array. Very common is corporate servers because if its good balance of speed and data integrity.
    Pro- relatively fast writes, but not as fast as Raid 0
    Con - somewhat wasteful of space as the parity information takes up space.
    Generally, since most video information comes in from tapes (at least for a while longer) and you can recapture from the tapes should a disk fail, data integrity is not of paramount importance. For example, a simple back up will take care of project, photoshop files, etc.
    Because of this, most common implementation is Raid 0. It gives the fastest read/writes and the most usable space on the disks. From the cost/performance standpoint, it is the best deal.
    Why do you want/need RAID disk arrays?
    If you are working in formats that have a much higher data rate than DV, the demands of supplying multiple streams will overtax they ability of a single disk to provide them.
    However, there are other issues as well. The speed of the connection between the computer and the disks once you reach a certain need is as important as the disk speed. If you get to the point where you NEED a raid 0 set up, you should also be sure to be running either a FW800 connection on its own bus or a SATA array.
    If you are working with DV sourced material, a second FW400 external drive (non-raid) will be fast enough. The raid 0 on a FW800 bus just allows you more simultaneous streams of video to be played in real time. (This ability is also tempered by the processor speed in your computer.)
    Questions? The quiz will be on Tuesday ...lol.
    cheers,
    x

  • Firewire drives do not show up on network

    I have a G5 with 2 external drives, 1 firewire, 1 USB
    I have a G4 with 2 external drives, both firewire.
    When these computers are networked,
    The G5 sees the internal drives from the G4.
    The G4 sees the internal drives from the G5, as well as the connected USB drive.
    But neither computer sees the external firewire drives of the other computer.
    I used to see these drives and made aliases for them, but they do not show up now.
    I am using the admin accounts from each computer.
    G5 running 10.4.5
    G4 running 10.3.9
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    I need to modify my question. I also have a G3 running 10.2.8
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    I shut off all the machines for the evening.
    Today, I restarted all the machines. Chose Finder->Go->Connect to Server->Browse
    From each machine, I was able to see the external drives on the other machines, as well as the internal drives, over the network. I did not use nor install sharepoints. It just works (with an admin account).
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    It does not show up in the Browse window when I connect to the G5 from any computer. If I move it to the G4, it also does not show up when I connect to the G4 from any computer. So it does not seem to be related to the OS version.
    In other words, it seems that since the Firelite is Dos formatted, I cannot see it on the network, even though it is a firewire drive.
    So how can I fix this problem?
    iMac G5, TiBook, G4 MP 500; G3 beige 333, iMac 333, others   Mac OS X (10.4.4)  

  • Has anyone been able to use an Apple Thunderbolt to FireWire to daisy chain a dozen or more FireWire drives?

    Ever since I realized that I was not able to connect my FireWire daisy chain to my brand new Retina MBP there has been problems. Four months down the road, I am still unable to use my FireWire drives and have experienced terrible problems whenever I connect my FireWire daisy chain to this new Mac.
    I have bought two of these adaptors from Apple now and both do the same thing. The daisy chain has been working perfectly for years with my older MBP and still does! There are no problems until I connect to the new Mac.
    I have 15 various hard drives in NewerTech and DatOptics enclosures for over 22 TB. When connected to the new Mac, I would have multiple apps just hang, sometimes just Apple apps, sometimes 3rd party. I will not be able to force quit them and they will keep relauching as you can watch them in the Force Quit window. The Finder will hang and there is no relaunching it. I am having to do a force shutdown twice an hour which leaves no time for work!
    After four months of this, now I am being told that Apple will buy back my Mac at full price. But I have basically lost the good part of four month’s worth of work because of constantly fighting the new Mac. This is cost me all my savings and I am about to lose a client. It certainly seems that releasing Thunderbolt1 was a huge, huge mistake.
    Does anyone know of any large Fire Wire daisy chain working with Thunderbolt?
    TIA,
    R

    Yes, my first post is all about how darn iffy the adaptors are and I have two of them to return now.
    I question your answer because I am betting that four drives that are in one enclosure NOT all RAIDed together as one drive, but as four separate drives that those four drive will count as four devices. The daisy chain that I had going had eight drives in TWO quad boxes, four drives in TWO dual drives and another drive in a single enclosure. A total of five “devices” if you will, but also a total of 13 drives that were usually in this daisy chain.
    Both of the Apple branded Thunderbolt to FireWire adaptors chocked BIG TIME on this and it works no problem on my older MBP. You basically can not use a new Mac when you are connected to a daisy chain like this!
    Just checked the Apple website and indeed, I can get a new MBP with FireWire 800, just not with the Retina display! I wish that I would have known this five months ago before this all started!

  • Can't properly open fcp6 project on firewire drive on another computer

    I have a long and complex fcp6 project that I have been editing with fcp6 on my piwermac g5 quad running leopard. The media and render files are each split between my boot drive and a second internal drive. I copy both drives onto a partitioned FireWire drive and then plug it into my macpro 3.1. The names on the FireWire partitions are exactly the same as the powermac drive names. The project opens perfectly on the 8 core macpro from the FireWire drive and I am able to render and other things much faster . However, I am about to outgrow the 1TB FireWire drive, so I got a larger one. I duped both partitions onto the similarly partitioned and identically named new bigger firewire drive....but when I go to open the project half the media filess are disconnected and even after I manually reconnect all kinds of error messages come up and the project is totally unworkable. So, why does the first firewiure drive work perfect but not the cloned nee FireWire drive? I even put an extra internal drive in the macpro and cloned the original FireWire to it but it does the same thing as the new FireWire, totally unworkable. I don't understand why things work perfectly with first FireWire but not with any other internal or external drive.  Any help would be tremendously appreciated.

    The original fiteewire which does open on the mac pro was partitioned apple partition map.  The new FireWire drive that doesn't open properly is also apm, but I've erased and partitioned i GUID.  I've tried using both disk utilities and superduper for the cloning in the past.  I'm doing the cloning onto the guid partitions right now and will let you know if it helps in the morning.  At any rate I appreciate your help.

  • How to secure firewire drive data for multi user mac ?

    I have a couple of external firewire hard drives attached to my mac which contain all my work files.
    My 6 yr son has started using my mac so I have set him up his own account and set up the parental controls etc.
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    emac   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  
    emac   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

    Log in under your account, and highlight the drive on the Desktop. Click cmd-i to Get Info. Make sure that, under Ownership and Permissions, you do not have "Ignore Ownership on this Drive" ticked. Now, again using Get Info, make sure that all top-level folders are owned by you, and that other users do not have access. (You might want to reduce the number of top-level folders to make this easier.)
    Now log in as your son and make sure you don't have access to those folders.
    Matt

  • How do I use a firewire drive as my start up disk?

    I have a 12" powerbook that I am trying to use with an external firewire drive as my start up disk. aI install 10.5 easyily but then when I try to start up from that drive it will not recognize the drive as a Start up disk. Any ideas as to what I am doing wrong.

    First, what Disk Utility tells you is correct, that SMART indicators aren't supported on an external drive. Nothing is wrong.
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  • How do I install a bootable copy of Tiger to an external Firewire drive?

    I've got a problem with my optical drive and cannot boot from a CD or DVD on my 17" flat panel iMac, running 10.2.8. I have bought Tiger and would like to upgrade my OS but want to be able to run some disc repair utilities on the iMac prior to doing the upgrade but can't run them on my boot disc.
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    Michael

    Because you must boot from the Tiger DVD in order to install Tiger I'm afraid you are somewhat out of luck. However, with no guarantee either express or implied here's something you can try:
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    http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=607363&#607363

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