RAID is it necessary

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Level 2

476 points

RAID is it necessary

I plan on purchasing a 12TB external thunderbolt drive. Probably to start a setup for a new Mac Pro. The drive comes with Preconfigured in RAID 0 (Configurable in RAID 1, and JBOD). I will mainly use the drive for photos and music. OS and all other software will be located on the main drive. It seems RAID is a bit complicated for the casual user. Right now I have four internal drives divided mainly into folders. Is RAID really helpful? The new external drive has two 6TB drives.

Mac Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3), Acer 24 inch, 300, 500,2x 1000 GB drives, 2TB backup

Posted on May 29, 2015 5:16 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

May 29, 2015 7:31 AM in response to James Borzak

Is RAID really helpful?

It's helpful if you want to combine more than one drive into a single volume, or if you want redundant copies of data on two or more drives. Otherwise, it's not.

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Answer 2

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

May 29, 2015 8:26 AM in response to James Borzak

What about two separate drives?

RAID can simplify some things. Mirroring data, or one large volume.

Do you have enough media that requires 4TB currently? Then a single 6TB is fine. What you have may be perfectly fine or it could be overkill.

RAID0 is for speed when one drive was too slow or too small, for scratch/cache and disposable, to be erased between projects.

Now there are 1TB SSDs that are 10x faster than a traditiional disk drive yet large enough to hold some media that benefits from speed - audio plugins or tracks or libraries, Lightroom catalogue, for instance.

As always, backup so you have extra data sets and can restore or keep a set off site even.

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