# Mac Software RAID Question



## Andrew Hayton (Mar 26, 2008)

I have set up a mirrored RAID set using disk utility and I am finding that LR is much slower getting the images off the drive. Is there an easy way to remove the drives from the raid set and keep all the info on one drive and then do a manual backup to the second drive? I don't have a spare drive to copy the contents to first.


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## rcannonp (Mar 26, 2008)

I had initially set up two drives the same way, but then I realized that the write times would take twice as long. I seem to remember having to reformat the drives to remove them from a RAID array, and I couldn't find a way around that. Unless someone can offer a better solution, I would buy a new HD and clone your old HD to that. Then I would reformat one of the old drives and clone back to it. Then reformat the other one. 

Now, I use a JBOD setup, and I use SuperDuper to clone one HD to the other.


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## Andrew Hayton (Mar 27, 2008)

I was wondering if I could remove one as though it was damaged and then delete the raid and then plug it in and copy the files back to the first drive but not sure if this would work. Hopefully there might be someone on here that might know.


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## Victoria Bampton (Mar 28, 2008)

That sounds a bit techie to me!  For the sake of an external drive, which are SO cheap now, I'd still be really tempted to take the safe course.


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## Andrew Hayton (Mar 28, 2008)

Here's an update. I copied all my images to a separate hard drive so they were safe. I then powered down one of the 2 drives in the raid. I then used disk utility to delete the raid and it said all data would be lost on the raid but having it backed up it was ok so I hit ok. The raid disappeared and renamed the drive with the raid name and left all the files on it. I then changed the name of the drive to backup. Next I turned on the next drive and back came the raid and I deleted it again and all images were still on the drive.
So it looks like you can delete a raid without losing data as long as one drive is turned off before you do it.


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## rcannonp (Mar 28, 2008)

Thanks for reporting back. I was wondering about that, but I didn't have any extra drives to test it with.


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## Victoria Bampton (Mar 28, 2008)

Phew, glad it worked Andrew!


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