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

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:

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…..

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.

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*

“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….”

Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)