In preparation to completely wipe my laptop hard drive clean and reinstall Mac OSX (it’s been a couple of years), I got a giant Western Digital My Book drive to back all my data to. Since it’s got two 500GB hard drives in it, I knew making it a mirrored RAID 1 drive would be the ideal solution for a peace of mind (that means making the two drives as if it’s only one, only files backed up to it will be mirrored, or synchronized, on both drives in case if one of the drives fails, all that data is still safe and sound on the 2nd drive).
Unfortunately Western Digital’s hardware doesn’t allow Apple’s Disk Utility to manage it. I ended up having to install Western Digital’s custom RAID utility. Sucks.
The initial backup took about 3 hours to backup about 35GB of data — not very fast. But then again, it’s software RAID. It’s not supposed to be fast anyway.
So now that I have all my stuff backed up. Next week I will be able to finally reinstall OSX and see if the damn machine runs any faster.
Next is to back up all those digital photos stored on Grace’s Mac, which was the real reason I bought this drive in the first place.