Mac OS X Server 10.6 - Apple's software mirrored RAID worth it?

Posted by Arko on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Arko
Published on 2010-06-23T09:22:59Z Indexed on 2011/03/07 16:11 UTC
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Filed under:

macosx

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raid

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software-raid

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mirror

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osx-10.6

Hi,

I am installing an Intel Xserve (Quad core Xeon) with Snow Leopard Server (10.6) on two 80Gb 7200rpm SATA HDs.

I created a mirrored RAID set using Disk Utility with those two drives, all went fine.

I was then asking myself if this is really a good idea. I know that an hardware RAID system would be better, but what about this software RAID?

Have you any feedback on this? Will it work fine if one HD breaks down? Does this affect performance?

[UPDATE]

In short: Hardware RAID is better than software RAID which is better than none.

Thank you all for the answers, they were very helpful.

Especially Gordon's script to monitor failures. As Apple's software RAID is pretty silent about a drive failure.

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