Monday, March 30, 2009

RAID 5 on an Leopard Xserve

This seems too trivial to merit a posting, but there are other posts that might lead one to believe that Leopard doesn't support RAID-5 on an Xserve, which it does, provided you've got a RAID card installed. When booting the installation DVD, just look for "RAID utility" under the "Utilities" menu. Just be sure to create the RAID before you pick an installation disk.

Update: Jashugan's right; I've updated appropriately. Though I still like the sound of "Xserver." One last thought: why ever does the RAID 5 volume build process take something like 2 hours / 100G? I understand the time required to rebuild parity after replacing a failed disk on a live array, but the initial build should be faster than that. Unless the OS is doing a bad block scan on the disks or somesuch, but ... why do that for a RAID and not under other circumstances?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

It's called an Xerve. I know I'm a pedant, but it is also useful for people searching for "RAID 5 Xserve"

You also should mention that you need to have a hardware RAID card for all this to work. Without it, you are limited to OS X Software RAID, which doesn't include RAID 5.