Dear all,

I was wondering whether the Mac Pro does have built-in RAID capability for its internal HD?

I was considering setting up to large HD in Raid 1 for data redundancy,

Would this built-in capabilty be software based, or hardware based?

If there is no built-in capability, is there a way to use a RAID card to do this?

Thanks,

Cheers,
Bernard

Bernard,

Yes, you can install a total of 4 drives in the Mac Pro and through Mac's Disk Utility software you can create a mirrored Raid 1 arrangement. In fact it is quite easy and IMHO works well.

Regards,
Ed

Actually, if you are talking about the boot partition, that's not claer. An X-Serve CAN boot from a raid 0 partition, a G5 in 10.4 can not. So, I don't know if the Mac Pro can or can't.

Jeff,

Actually I was not speaking about a boot partition. My intend is to protect data on internal HD by configuring 2 data HD in Raid 1.

The OS would be on a third disk not configured in Raid.

Well, this is still theoretical today since my switch over from Windows to Mac is still pending on Adobe Japan's acceptance to migrate my Windows Creative Suite Pro 2.3 license into a Mac one... any help from you on that would be greatly appreciated (see the email I sent you a couple of days ago).

Regards,
Bernard

Mine is set up with a 250 GB (stock Apple - not sure what make it is) drive as the boot partition, with all photos on a mirrored pair of 750 GB Seagates.

-dan

It's possible to boot off a RAID volume with 10.4 (PPC or x86). You have to boot to the install CD first and then setup the RAID from there. You'll loose all data in the process since it has to rebuild though there are ways around that.

The system can be maintained if you first clone your main drive into a disc image and store that on a third backup drive. Once the RAID is set up then just restore from the image to the RAID.