Quote:
Originally Posted by KevWind
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What I am uncertain about is how to use the RAID configuration, but will call OWC on Monday
What I don't know is if the computer will see the 4 drives in the enclosure as 4 different drives, or as on big one ,
On my old Mac Pro the two SSD drives (even though on one Dual PCIe drive adaptor sled) appeared as two different drives.
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Most multi-disk enclosures support RAID 0 and RAID 1 (striping and mirroring). Mirroring is the only one that provides redundancy, and that's what I use so I don't bother backing up, though, of course, it's slightly riskier, since they're both in the same place, but it's easy. (And it does work, as I had a disk fail once). Both of those will present 2 disks (which should be the same size, if not identical) as a single device.
Striping gives you better performance because you're writing half (or less!) data to each drive, but unless you have one of the higher RAID configurations with parity so missing data can be rebuilt, a single drive failure leaves you with nothing.
Some enclosures also support "JBOD" - just a bunch of disks - which lets you toss in anything you've got handy and it'll present it as a single drive. It doesn't use striping, so the only benefit is having a single, large storage "device" when you really need one. You'll still want to have a recovery plan if the data matters.
The controller configuration can be as simple as a hardware switch, or you may need some other software to manage the enclosure settings.