Archive for the ‘Mac OS X’ Category

Using RAID 10 on Mac OS X

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

Now that your raid set is hosed, feel free to experiment with new things. Like a hybrid raid that uses a software RAID 0 to stripe across two hardware RAID 1 mirrors.

First, boot off your Mac OS X install DVD. Open RAID Utility. Use it to create two mirrors. Something like this:

Picture 1.png

Then, open Disk Utility and play with its software raid features until you make it stripe across those two mirrored volumes you just set up. Like this:

Picture 2.png

Now install Mac OS X on your new, hybrid, RAID 10, that can handle up to two disk failures (if they aren’t in the same mirror), and doesn’t become degraded in a disk failure scenario, and has very fast rebuild times. win-win-win.

Now, to go out and buy a big external drive to run Time Machine with…..

Posted in Apple, Mac Hardware, Mac OS X | Comments Off

NEVER USE RAID 5. EVER.

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

So, over a year ago I bought a Mac Pro with the Apple RAID Card. I was really disappointed to find that it didn’t support RAID 10, which is a form of nested raid whereby a RAID 0 (a stripe) is laid across two or more RAID 1’s (disk mirrors). Apple’s implementation allowed for RAID 0+1, which is the other way around: a mirror of two stripe sets usually. That is a much inferior setup, because if any single disk fails, then both disks in that striped pair are out — meaning half your mirror is down. In a RAID 10, you can lose a disk without penalty. You can even lose two disks as long as they aren’t on the same side of the stripe (i.e. aren’t both in the same mirrored pair) — again, without penalty.

In light of Apple’s foolish RAID 0+1 option on their raid card, I opted for RAID 5 instead. Against my better judgement. But with faith in Apple. AND IT FAILED. I lost one disk last week. I promptly shut down my machine in an orderly fashion (because SATA isn’t hot-swappable; only SAS can do that in a Mac Pro). I replaced the failed disk with an identical cold spare that I had on hand (holla). I booted up, I started the RAID Utility program, I marked the new disk a hot spare, the Utility added it back into my raid set and began rebuilding the array, which, of course, was in a degraded state. The rebuild finished — all lights were green — the RAID Utility told me that my RAID 5 set was “Viable (Good)”. Viola! Right?

Wrong. I rebooted the machine and it never came back up! I booted off the Mac OS X DVD and verified the volume in Disk Utility. Fail. Inaccurate record count. Unable to mount the volume. I re-open the RAID Utility and attempt a VERIFY procedure on the raid set. Fail. It won’t even start the routine.

In the end, I lost the entire 1.2 TB RAID 5, with about 600 gigs of my precious data on it. I had backups of all the most recent things, but lost some music, and quite a lot of movies I’d ripped from NetFlix DVD’s and — because of their size mainly — hadn’t backed-up onto my too-small external drive. Yeaaaah. *sigh*

Thanks, Apple.

Posted in Apple, Geek, Mac Hardware, Mac OS X | Comments Off

Mac OS X needs built-in scanning

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Mac OS X should have built-in scanning software. It should work with any scanner or all-in-one that you plug in. Just like the built-in print drivers. And a scanner control panel.

Right now the hodge-podge of proprietary apps and drivers from HP, or Canon, or what-have-you aren’t getting it done, and it’s just a mess. I have an HP PSC 2175 all-in-one. This is a few years old, but still a wonderful device. It actually came with an Apple I ordered level years ago. I’ve never had a [mechanical] problem with it.

Now I can’t get OS X to scan with it, no way, no how. HP hasn’t updated their software to make the scanner portion function with Leopard (but Leopard has built-in drivers for the printer side). And the old drivers from Tiger were working until I updated to 10.5.4. Haven’t been able to scan since.

I even used MacPorts to install Xsane and all its dependencies — it kernel panics my Mac every damn time I try to load it. Something about the USB stack it really doesn’t like.

Anyway — that’s my rant. Apple needs to work on scanning in OS X. *sigh*

Posted in Mac OS X, Mac Software | No Comments »

Precipitate: Search Google Docs and Bookmarks from Spotlight

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

Precipitate: search Google Docs and Bookmarks from Spotlight:

“Google’s Mac group has released Precipitate, a plugin which allows you to search Google Docs and Google Bookmarks from the same interface that you search you Mac. It works with both Spotlight and Google Desktop for Mac….”
precipitate070808.jpg

Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Posted in Mac OS X, Open Source | No Comments »