RAID Help

I've been looking into this and seem to be just confusing myself I believe.

ere is the situation. I have $200 worth of Best Buy gift cards melting in my pocket. Trying to think of the best way to upgrade my current system.

2009 iMac, i5 Quad Core, 2.66 with 1 terabyte drive. 16 gig ram and the ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 MB

Anywho.... Best Buy near my home has WD MyBook 2 terabyte externals on the cheap. These drives are FW 800. I'm wondering if I could buy two of these and set them up in the RAID version that increase performance. Would said set up be of any noticeable benefit? Or just set them up for redundancy and be happy with them as is?

RAID is one set of drives inside of one physical inclosure controlled by a single, built in RAID controller card. You can't buy several individual inclosures and RAID them. No, won't work.

Thanks Ben. that is a big bummer. I thought for sure I read right that it could be done with software with a Mac. I'm at least happy to have a bunch ore faster storage.

OSX has a built in software Raid controller, you'll find it in Disk Utility, it looks really easy to set up. But I've never used it.

As for performance, I have no idea. I was told years ago when I first looked into Raid (using a PC) to avoid software controllers. I was going to use one with internal drives but I have always thought there to be no reason why you couldn't use 2 external drives.

I can't remember if it was ill-advised for performance or reliability related reasons. So it may well be different on OSX than it was on Windows back at the time when hardware raid controllers weren't included on pretty much every PC motherboard.

Thanks guys. I guess at this point I'm just gonna use Carbon Copy to help out with back ups on the two WD's. I'll use Time Machine on my internal to another drive. My next step will be an actual raid set up. My main concern was to get backups at this point.

Something just crossed my mind, if anyone can offer more knowledge on this it could be of use to many.

The new Pegasus J2 drives and the Blackmagic MultiDock dont have hardware Raid controllers, they rely on the OSX software controller in Disk Utility.