Can raided firewire hard drives from one mac be attached to another mac?

June 5, 2006 2:30 PM

Can raided firewire hard drives from one mac be attached to another mac? In other words....here's my situation. I currently have a mac mini that I use as a backup fileserver. I have 2 250gb hard drives attached to this mac mini. Although it works fine and I'm not really looking to upgrade, the 256 mbs of original ram are not enough to run any programs on it very efficiently (as far as time is concerned).

anyway, long story short...I now have a G4 tower that I'd like to attache the hard drives to. The main reason being that I need to install and use Extensis Portfolio to keep track of about 70+ gigs of photos and I figured it would run better on the tower with dual processors and 2 gigs of ram than on the mini.

Now the question is whether switching the hard drives from one computer to the other is as simple as unplugging from the mini and plugging them into the tower? will OS on the tower automatically recognize that the drives are raided or do I need to set them up in Disk Utility again? Both machines are running OS X (not server).

My gut is telling me it's simple but I don't want to gamble with that much data even if they are backed up to dvd's.

As always, thanks in advance.

posted by eatcake to computers & internet (3 comments total)

The two drives will be recognized just fine on another Mac, whether mirrored or striped, so long as they were both software-RAIDed with Disk Utility, whether OS X client or Server. Make sure the tower's powered down before powering up the drives.

If you used ATTO's RAID software, you'd need to install that software on the tower, first.
posted by Mr. Six at 2:41 PM on June 5, 2006

You could try just teathering both macs together with a firewire cable, and holding T on the the mac you wish to read FROM while that mac is booting.

It will boot up like a FireWire Hard Drive and your other mac will recognize it as such.

This works on iBooks/PowerBooks. YMMV.
posted by jimmy0x52 at 2:58 PM on June 5, 2006

Thanks guys. I powered the tower down. Plugged in the hard drives and booted back up. They were recognized as being raid-ed and all the data is there and usable.

Thanks again.
posted by eatcake at 7:49 PM on June 5, 2006