Adjusting After the Crash

After our iMac hard drive died and Time Machine failed to restore our computer, we decided to create a mirrored RAID external disk set to run Mac OS X on.

Sequence

At first we thought the sequence was to RAID the disks – using the disk utility – and then to create a GUID partition on the combined RAID disk. We did this, began installing OS X, but then ran into a failed installation screen. Next we decided to create GUID partitions on each disk to be RAIDed and then then RAID the disks. This has worked. We are using a two disk enclosure with one Hitachi Deskstar and one Western Digital Caviar (both 320 GB) disks. We will next do the same thing with our other two disk enclosure, so we will have two different Mac OS X installed RAID disks.

Conclusion

Recently we have become increasingly convinced that the single non-redundant disk design that almost all computers are sold with is very flawed. The Mac Pros can be purchased pre-RAIDed, but none of the other Macs have the capability to have two internal hard disks.. Considering he price of disks, this would be very inexpensive.