I have two G-Drive external hard drives, and I want to improve my backup by using both in case one crashes. Mine is a new iMac with the Yosemite operating system. I would also like to drag the files to be stored to the hard drive and not use Time Machine....... How do I connect them and do this?
iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10)
Start by connecting them to a USB port on the rear. You will need to use two ports. One solution for you is to create a mirrored RAID using the RAID setup in Disk Utility.
How to rebuild a software RAID mirror
RAID Basics
For basic definitions and discussion of what a RAID is and the different types of RAIDs see RAIDs. Additional discussions plus advantages and disadvantages of RAIDs and different RAID arrays see:
Hardware and Service Comparison
Hardware or Software RAID?
RAID Hardware Vs RAID Software - What is your best option?
RAID is a method of combining multiple disk drives into a single entity in order to improve the overall performance and reliability of your system. The different options for combining the disks are referred to as RAID levels. There are several different levels of RAID available depending on the needs of your system. One of the options available to you is whether you should use a Hardware RAID solution or a Software RAID solution.
RAID Hardware is always a disk controller to which you can cable up the disk drives. RAID Software is a set of kernel modules coupled together with management utilities that implement RAID in Software and require no additional hardware.
Pros and cons
Software RAID is more flexible than Hardware RAID. Software RAID is also considerably less expensive. On the other hand, a Software RAID system requires more CPU cycles and power to run well than a comparable Hardware RAID System. Also, because Software RAID operates on a partition by partition basis where a number of individual disk partitions are grouped together as opposed to Hardware RAID systems which generally group together entire disk drives, Software RAID tends be slightly more complicated to run. This is because it has more available configurations and options. An added benefit to the slightly more expensive Hardware RAID solution is that many Hardware RAID systems incorporate features that are specialized for optimizing the performance of your system.
For more detailed information on the differences between Software RAID and Hardware RAID you may want to read: Hardware RAID vs. Software RAID: Which Implementation is Best for my Application?
Rather than moving things by hand for your backups, I suggest that you examine Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! for your backup needs. I use the former and you can basically set it up to backup everything or only selected items. Doing this manually is futile exercise, IMO.
27" i7 iMac (Mid 2011) refurb, OS X Yo (10.10.4), Mavs, ML & SL, G4 450 MP w/10.5 & 9.2.2
Clone - Carbon Copy Cloner (Often recommended as it has more features than some others)
Clone Software – 6 Applications Tested
How do I connect two hard drives to a computer?
