RAID 1 Mirroring, Your Mac and Digital Photography
I am often asked about the best types of storage solutions you should use for digital photography, especially if you should look at using RAID storage on the Mac Pro. In this series of articles, I hope to explain some uses for each of the most popular RAID types, RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 5. RAID is not specific to an operating system, and equally applies to Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Whilst Mac OS X is capable of supporting RAID 1 through the RAID Utility software, only the Mac Pro provides support for more than one internal disks. You can stripe across disks connected via USB or Firewire, but the gains are minimal and it is not really worth the effort.
RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is the use of 2 or more disks to achieve greater reliability, greater performance or greater capacity.
In this article, I will be describing RAID level 1, or Mirroring. Looking at the above definition, RAID level 1 provides greater reliability, but neither greater performance or capacity. I have previously covered RAID 0 Striping in a previous article.
