Can I use 2 external firewire drives as RAID 1 with OSX (10.5.4). Perhaps this was discussed before. But my search brought no results.

Thank you,
Johannes

Yes, but unless you put the 2 drives on separate FW ports you won't really be getting much in the way of a speed boost because putting two drives on the same port will be bandwidth limited by the port. You do the array in Disk Utility. Not that the risk of loosing your data increases by writing to the two disks with no redundancy...you loose one drive, you've lost your data and drive recovery services are very expensive for recovering data from any array set up except mirrored or spanned.

Isn't RAID 1 mirroring (not striping, RAID 0)? Then it's about redundancy, which you would get, and not speed, which is what Jeff is talking about.

That is correct, Jonas, RAID 1 is mirroring. I used to do this all the time with Firewire/USB drives. Saved my bacon once or twice.

These days, since I've discovered macgurus.com, I now do this with esata only using industrial strength enclosures.

Thank you all. Yes, I want to have more security - not speed.

I've tried eSATA with fantec housings. But ran into trouble, because these fantec housings (2 drives in RAID 1) stopped working under 10.5. The manual said OS X 10.3 and higher. But that was not true. Because of the wrong manual the dealer took the fantec housings back.

Then I switched to NAS (ICY BOX). They are nice but slow. And you can't format them HFS+. So you have not all the Mac convenience with them. They are fine for 2nd backup. But not nice to work on.

So I now want to try RAID 1 with MAXTOR 1T external FW drives. After I know it should work, I'll give it a try.

Best,
Johannes

Yeah, RAID 1, mirrored, sorry I always get confused between 1 & 0. Same deal though...if you set up a mirrored RAID 1, you'll want to try to get the two drives on separate FW ports since you'll be writing to two drives at once and the throughput will be port limited (meaning it'll slow down a lot).