Raid Drive, Any audio uses for a RAID drive? Options

[jfitz]

Well, I've inherited a G4 w/ a 149 GB Raid drive, and I'm going to try to put together a small recording system bit by bit. The Mac hard drive is only 17 GB. I am intending to use LOGIC 6 Gold. I will be recording live sound as well as midi.

Can I use the RAID drive to advantage, or if not can I reconfigure it as individual drives?

I am really a novice and need some advice here.

Thanks and
PAX
jfitz

[dixiechicken]

Yes and (no ).
Depends on the raid configuration.

2 first raid-levels 0 and 1, is striped or mirrored, and needs at least 2 physical drives.
raid level 3 and above needs at least 3 physical drives.
(one or more physical drives are used for the parity check bits)

For simplicitys sake I will assume your raid system consists of two physical drives.

A striped drive is faster than a single drive or mirrored drive system.
Striped means writing/reading data from/to the 2 drives at the same time.
( half of the data goes to one drive the other half onto the other drive )
Resulting in shorter read & write times.

Mirrored is just what the name implies an exact duplicate of ALL the data on both drives. Resulting in enhanced security and actually a very slight performance increase.
( in either writing or reading data - dont remeber which)

You can use your raid system in either configuration. With 2 physical drives you can also span them to a single logical drive, whith doubled space.
( two 120 Gb drives will appear as one 240Gb drive )

For simplified operation in all raid-mode levels it's important that all physical drives are of the same size and make.

Go ahead and format & experiment with your raid system before recording anything vital on it, then you'll get a feeling for the different raidmodes.
(dont format your boot-drive - that will save you lots of time )

Cheers: Dixiechicken