[Leica] External Hard Drives - Combining FW400 and 800 OK?

[henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)]

At 1:22 PM -0400 8/28/06, Richard S. Taylor wrote:
>Brian - The iMac G5 does have USB 2.0 but I have not been 
>considering it because I'd need to buy a USB hub to run the drives 
>(all my USB ports are full).  In any case,  I have now found Western 
>Digital drives (and I assume there must be LaCie and Maxor, drives, 
>too) that have two FireWire ports so my first issue has gone away.
>
>Apple has made setting up RAID configurations easy in Disk Utility 
>and I'll use that to set the system up.
>
>From recent posts, it seems someone has had trouble with drives from 
>all the majors (including me with LaCie) so which brand to buy is a 
>toss up and I may just do it by price and availability.
>
>I think I remember you saying you liked the Seagate drives and I 
>will look into those.
>
>Am still wrestling with whether or not to move my bootable backup 
>volume onto the RAID 1 array or leave it where it is on a separate 
>disc.

I don't think you can boot off the RAID. My setup is to have one 
internal boot disk, mirrored onto an external firewire 400 disk of 
the same size. Then I have a two disk striped RAID for intermediate 
files and swap files. Data goes on external drives, whether firewire 
or USB2.

The other issue is whether or not you can boot off USB2 drives. The 
other thing is that Firewire 400 still is faster on my machine by 1.2 
to 1.5 times compared with USB2, let along Firewire 800. That said, I 
just bought a couple of 250Gb drives in USB2 enclosures to use as 
additional data storage; the price was too good to pass up.

-- 
    *            Henning J. Wulff
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