MacResearch

Hi, I've just got a new 8-core Mac Pro in my office :]

I'm planning on running lots of MATLAB stuff on here - actually it will be shared between me and several other users in our group. Currently it has just got the default 320GB drive configuration, but I've got 4x 1TB Hitachi hard drives I'm just about to install in it, and I'm trying to decide on a good configuration for partitioning and RAID. Also got an additional 12GB of RAM just about to go in.

I spent a while looking at this before we put in the order and decided the RAID card wasn't worth getting - we'd run a software RAID 0+1 (or 1+0, whichever it supports) instead, giving us 2TB of useable space (should still be plenty I hope).

Now I've seen this link: http://www.macprojournal.com/partitions.html

which suggests a nice way of setting things up. This doesn't seem to have been suggested in many other places, i.e.. you can set up the partitions on the drives before creating the RAID, then have different parts configured as different levels of RAID. The example is to make a fast RAID 0 on the innermost portion of the drive, to use as scratch/temporary data space. Then make a RAID 0+1 partition to act as a boot disk, and finally a larger RAID 0+1 taking up the rest of the space for storing other data on.

This seems like a pretty good idea, but I'm just wondering if there is a more optimal setup, given this guy didn't have simulation use of the machine in mind. As an idea of the usage, we might be running several virtual machines running linux or even windows to run multiple copies of 64-bit Matlab. These might be running simulations taking up 2 cores each, and possibly writing out quite amounts of data. I know some people use separate drives for system, apps, scratch etc. With several virtual machines, it becomes hard to predict what's going to happen in terms of disk activity. Anyone else played about with RAID partitioning?

I'm also wondering if it's worth making another couple of RAID 1 partitions on the same disks, just for backup (doesn't need to be fast)... or if that's getting silly. We don't have any other external backup unfortunately, but the 2TB should be plenty of space really, even if some of it is "doubly redundant". I'm just trying to imagine the case where one drive fails... the RAID 0+1 should still carry on running, right, just it is then even more vulnerable to another failure which would make the data unrecoverable. Whereas if there is an additional RAID1 backup on two of the other disks, we're still covered until the broken drive gets replaced.

I also have a question as to what is the best thing to do with the 320GB drive that came as default - is there anything better than just keeping in a box? I don't think it can be connected in the optical drive bay because it's SATA, right? It would be nice to be able to use it as a backup (time machine?) disk for the system or critical data.