Gregory Todd Williams

In preparation for Aperture, I’m in the process of upgrading my memory and disk setup on my two computers, trying to increase efficiency and make room for more photos and applications. The upgrades involve a gig of RAM for my PowerBook and two new 400GB disks for my PowerMac. Given the ever-increasing size of important data I’ve got on my computer (including over 30GB of photos, CVS archives of my public and private programming projects along with a sizable and well organized music collection), I decided that instead of adding 800GB to the system, I’d mirror the drives providing a level of redundancy and a safety net in case one of the drives fails.

The RAID support in Mac OS X is well integrated, but not terribly full featured. Here’s the biggest problem I ran into:

• A PowerMac G5 has only two internal drive bays.
• I have two existing drives in the two drive bays.
• I have two new drives to put in the drive bays.
• I need to move all the data from the two old drives to the new two-drive mirrored array.
• All the disks in a mirrored arrays need to be initialized at the same time.
• I have no external enclosure capable of holding the old SATA disks.

Given this situation, moving all of my old data to a new mirrored array is a cumbersome task of using an old external 200GB IDE disk to move data back and forth as I swap disks into the PowerMac four times: copy data, turn off computer, swap disks, turn on computer, rinse and repeat.

After this is all over, I’ll have 280GB between two SATA disks that I’ll need to figure out what to do with. Buying an external SATA enclosure would be an option, but I’m getting sick of having lots of external disks that suck power and are rather inconvenient to split data between. If you’ve got a better use for some 3.5” SATA disks, let me know and maybe you’ll be getting a package for Christmas.