Hi all.

Well after a lot of time and effort I finally got XP and OSX running on my Mac Pro.

Yesterday I bought 2 new drives (2x Segate 250gig) which I have now setup as a RAID ) (striped) with the 250 Gig Segate that came with the Mac PRo (3x250 Striped). I am using another 300gig Segate SATA drive what I have installed OSX on and XP (using boot camp of cause).

Well my problem is that I can't copy and past to the Raid set. If I drag and drop it says that it needs Authentication to allow it (what I do by entering my password) and it will then copy the contents across to the stripped set (what I want to use as my main storage area for Video, Music and art work.

It seems to me it is just a security setting or something but I am racking my brands on how to get rid of this. Can I have these disk act just like my main 300gig drive with OSX installed on?

If so how do you do this?

Cheers...

Do a 'Get Info' on the icon for the RAID volume in Finder. Check "Ignore ownership on this volume".

See if that helps.


B.

Thanks for that.

I actually just figured it out before I cam back to see any posts.

By the way it does work!

Keep us posted on how you guys go with your RAID volumes. I will be getting a Mac Pro in a couple of months and I already have 4 x 500GB drives for it. I'm not quite sure how I'll set these up yet...

Well I got mine all sorted.

What I have found is this:

You can run OSX on a Raid Stripe set but you can not run OSX and Bootcamp on a Stripe set.

If you plan to run OSX with Bootcamp you will have to have this set up on a non-RAID disk. I have a single 300gig setup as my OS drive (OSX/Windows XP) and 3x250gig RAID stripe set setup as a second drive for OSX.

Others may have found diffrent results to me but this is what I have found.

I hope this helps.

The reason being that it's software RAID. So the the RAID is being controlled by the OS.

You'd need a HW RAID card to be able to run multiple OSes, but this is true of any platform.

I won't be letting Windoze anywhere near mine! I haven't needed it for the last two years with my G5 so I can't see any point installing it for no reason.

Have you noticed any performance increase though. That's what I'm interested in!

I can say yes I have.

It is better with regards to deep reads and copying files across like my 30 Gig Mp3 collection.

I you are not going to Bootcamp do the RAID across all your hdd's, or you can run 2 drives in stripe set and then mirror your 2 Stripe sets (using the 4 drives in total).

I'm not really interested in mirroring at all - I have a couple of large external drives and I do a backup every night. I want to have a fast scratch disc for Photoshop. I've read about people partitioning their drives and making a striped RAID of just the fast outer partitions. I'll keep researching and see what I find...

If thats really what you want to do I'd stop frackin' around with software RAID-0 and go and get a decent HW card


Although tests shown here show OSX SW RAID-0 to be pretty good:

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/OSX_R....html#storytop

But HW raid spanks it every-time.

If the work you are doing is important enough to worry about the difference between a SW Stripe and a single spindle then I'd pony up the cash and go get a decent RAID card.

What's the advantage of using a hardware card over software for RAID-0? From the benchmarks you linked to, it looks like a minimal speed increase. I don't think CPU use is a factor these days with RAID-0 is it?

Well the SW RAID wasnt faster in every test - in one test it was slower than a single disk. But yes your point is a fair one. Also those tests are a with an old version of OSX and an old raid-card, so really you'd want to be looking at proper tests showing a current setup.

I think that given the OP is talking about squeezing as much performance as possible out of his drives by using the "fast outer partitions" I reckon recommending a HW RAID card is a good call.

Plus it provides a level of abstraction away from the OS which is a good thing for various reasons.

I'd say that RAID performance is all a bit dependent on what you are doing and it really does vary based on all the given variables

I'd wonder if a fast 10k RPM drive is the best bet?

Finding good tests and research is the hard part I suppose

al

Hardware RAID is better then Software no questions. It is also better for recovering loss in Mirror as well as you are not software reliant. With most PC's that run RAID on the mother boards this is actually a Software RAID as well, except it has more of the benifits that H/Ware RAID gives you.

At the end of the day nuthing beats H/Ware RAID but it does cost to do it correctly.

The BIG problem with hardware RAID on a Mac Pro is that you can't use the four internal drive bays! These Intel mother boards that are used in the Mac Pro apparently have RAID hardware built in which is disabled by Apple for some reason.

I agree that if you want faster RAID 1 (mirroring) or RAID 5 or 6 you have no choice but to use a RAID card and external enclosure. But that is beyond my needs. As for 10k rpm drives, the speed increase compared to the dollar increase is just not worth it. If money was no object I would have bought four of the new Hitachi 1TB drives.

I have also been looking at SoftRaid. I don't know if it will be of any advantage for what I'm doing though. At this stage it won't boot from a RAID 0 volume but it may make it easier to set up a RAID 0 with partitions...

I'm curious, why not?