setting up external drives.....

I have some new OWC Raid 0 firewire drives for FCP media and some other OWC standard firewire drives for time machine and carbon copy cloner backup boot drive. Should I format these drives with disk utility before I use them? My understanding is the RAID 0 drives are hardware raid - so I presume I wouldn't be using the disk utility raid option - but if I format this drive with disk utility, does this have any implications for the hardware raid (I presume not....but just double checking here).

Anything I should know about options in formatting....mac os x extended (journaled) is the option I believe I should choose???

Thanks in advance....

EW

Hmmm.....no response.....

To simplify......

When you purchase a new firewire drive, do you erase and format before you use it the first time, or just go with the out of the box setup as is?

EW

Erase as 1 partition

HFS+ non-journaled if its for a media drive...



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Erase.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Cool...and this is perhaps a bit off topic......but for time machine backup and for Carbon Copy Cloner backup of my boot drive....what format should I choose?

EW

Mac OS Extended. Journaled is fine, as it's not going to be used as a frame store.



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Great....thx for that info......

Just to clarify one thing......

The drive specs say it is hardware raid 0. I presume that means I can format the drive as a single standard drive with disk utility and this will not effect the RAID 0 performance of the drive. Does anyone know if this is correct?

EW

RAID "0" is not a single drive set-up. RAID "0" writes by striping data to 2 or more drives at the same time.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Right......I understand that.....perhaps I was not clear in what I was trying to get at.....

So....I have an OWC drive that is HARDWARE RAID 0 (I guess it's two drives in one enclosure). As I understand it the management of the RAID as a RAID 0 is handled by hardware / firmware in the drive itself that cannot be affected by simply formatting the drive within disk utility. That is, DISK UTILITY will only ever see this drive as one drive (although it is actually 2 drives), and the RAID performance will not be affected in any way by erasing and formatting the drive as a single drive from within disk utility. I think this is the case, but was wondering if anyone here knows for sure.

EW

Yeah...well, I don't know about OWC units but when I erase my CalDigit Firewire VR, the hardware in the enclosure will display this multiu-drive unit as one drive (array) in Disk Utility and on the desktop. No need to "create a RAID "0" setup".

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

You can tell if your device is hardware RAID as it will show up in Disk Utility as one drive. If it is software Raid you will see the volume then some RaiD Slices for each drive in the Raid array.

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Dean

"When I see you floating down the gutter I'll give you a bottle of wine."
Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica.