MP 7,1 Partitioning an OWC External RAID 5?

[choreo]

Not sure the best place to post this, but here goes...

I have a 2019 Mac Pro running the latest version of Monterey. Today I purchased an external 16TB OWC ThunderBay 4 that came pre-configured as RAID 5 using SoftRAID XL. I have never dealt with an external RAID before. From what I have read, if I want to use this a a backup solution for more than one internal volume using CCC, then it appears I should "partition" the RAID drives into separate volumes (one for each internal volume I want to back up)?

1) Does this sound correct about "partitioning" the RAID drives?
2) If so, would I use Disk Utility or SoftRAID-XL to perform the partitioning?

 

[profdraper]

Sure, you can do what you like with the disks, really. First tip would be to write to OWC support if you have any particular queries, I've found them to be very good in the past.

I've been using a Thunderbay 6 & SoftRaid XL for some years now with very few issues (I did have a disk fail once, but easily swapped it out for a new one). More disks & flexibility on mine, but same principles:

You 'could' easily reformat and 'break apart' your four disks as a bunch of single disks (JOBD), or say, make two of them into a RAID, and use the others partitioned as you like for such things as Time Machine, sound libraries and other back-ups etc. Or make a RAID out of three of the disks, with a 4th as spare data duties.

If you try to partition an existing RAID array, the problem is that recovery using the partitiy data will be difficult, if not impossible, eg, see:

RAID5 with partitions? is it possible?

Computer Mens: Going to be setting up a software RAID5 system via linux. I have a number of different drives here with different capacities (3x200GB, 2x300GB), so I was wondering; is it possible to partition each of those drives into 100GB each, so that I won't have to reduce the 300GB drives...

forums.anandtech.com

The main thing about the RAID & its format types is that it provides various levels of data redundacy. I use RAID 4 as recommended by OWC for SSDs; in the case of spinners I believe this is RAID 5. Do a google & you can find out all about these formats & best use cases. In the case of RAIDs 4&5, formatting uses a slice of one of the disks as a 'parity' partition, meaning this retains FAT data etc & so can restore the arrary or allow us to swap out a drive if necessary.

The ones to be aware of are RAID 0 and RAID 10. In the case of the former, this only helps speed but has no redundancy. RAID 10 provides the best of both worlds but needs more disks becuase one of them is a dedicated parity disk.

See: https://www.owc.com/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-understanding-raid-updated

RAID Types: What is RAID & Which RAID Level is Right for You?

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