Raid 1 with two cables or daisy-chained?

I'm new at this, but I want to create a simple mirror Raid (Raid 1) with two identical Firewire Lacie external drives and I hope someone can answer these couple of questions:

1. Is it better to use two separate Firewire cables? That is, each cable secured in its own port on my iMac and correspondingly each cable into its own port on an individual Lacie drive (one cable going from computer to external drive for each drive), or;

2. Is it better to "daisy-chain" the two drives and only have one Firewire cable connected to my iMac.

Am I going to see any difference in performance either way? And, can I expect some degradation in performance notwithstanding which way (two wires or a daisy-chain) I connect the Raid.

Thanks, I appreciate any help you might give me.

iMac intel, Mac OS X (10.6.1)

Posted on Oct 5, 2009 10:52 AM

Oct 6, 2009 2:26 PM in response to Charles Cole

Hi Everyone, I'm the Original Poster,
Thanks so much for all of the comments and advise. I fully understand how the RAID 1 isn't a backup solution in the conventional sense of providing protection against file corruption and accidentally erasing a file. It seems that it does, however, provide a copy of the files in case one of the drives fails. Essentially, that is the level of protection that appeals to me the most. But, again, I fully understand the problems with RAID 1.

My original question was concerning the daisy-chaining versus a single cable to the external drives. I'm still monitoring for this and I've gotten a couple of opinions. Sounds to me like with one controller, even if there are two Firewire ports means that one cable is sufficient.

Thanks again for your comments. This is a great forum and folks are always helpful.