Set up 2 FW800 JBOD units as a RAID 1(mirror) I've got 2 GMax external drive enclosures, each one takes 2 3.5" SATA disks (up to 1TB per disk), configured to appear as a single 'JBOD' unit. I use FW800 out of the MacBook Pro into one unit, and then the pass-thru connector from that unit to the next one (each unit has a pass-thru connector; these boxes really were a steal at the price).

I use one unit as my main 'projects and laptop backups' drive, and the second unit is my backup copy of the first one. I've been managing the backup copies using SuperDuper!, manually initiating a 'smartcopy' of the main drive to the backup drive at least once a week.

The disks I had in one of the units recently failed, and now I've bought 4 identical new 1TB Seagate disks. Before I set things up much as they were before (2TB in each unit), I was wondering if I could make a software RAID 1 unit out of them? I thought that this would be an easier system for me to manage than manually backing-up.

Has anyone run a software RAID 1 drive on external drives like this? Is it worth the trouble, or should I stick to my current regime? I'm not looking to increase performance at all, I'm looking to minimise the human-involvement in my backup process. :-)

This would be on the current patch of Snow Leopard.
A RAID setup is not a backup. A RAID is a way of mitigating hardware failure, its value is that despite a piece of hardware failing you can keep working with no down time. In your case, the issue you had a (a failed drive) would have been handled just fine by a RAID, but the following would not:


Accidentally deleting a file (the RAID will happily delete it on both of the mirrored drives.
Data corruption due to bugs in any programs you are using (again, the RAID will dutifully store the bad data the apps send to it).


The above are software and user failures. If you are confident you (or an app) will never make a mistake where you need to rollback to an older version then you simply don't need a backup, and going to a RAID to mitigate potential HW failure is fine. If you are like the rest of us an make mistakes then you probably want actual backups, and to add a RAID in addition to that if down time is very costly for you.