Raid 1 for travel and backup

So, I will be going on a business trip, I need to bring two hard drives, one regular, and one backup, would I be able to set two external HDDs on a eSata or Firewire Software Raid 1 so I can only have to write the data once? Instead of transfering all the data onto one drive and then copying it to the other? Will a software raid work on a differnt computer? or only the one set up on? And can I use the software raid 1 to write the drives, and then when I get to my sepearte computer at my business trip, use one of the drives seperately? Im sorry if I am not being clear, ask if anything doesn't make sense. My current computer and the one I will be using on my business trip are both Mac Pro 8 cores with Mac OX10.5

Thank you for responding Jon, unfortunately I had already left for my trip when you responded. However, your advice was contradictory to my experience.

In my own testing I was able to take each drive either individually or separately and access the files on the drive and the RAID as a whole or degraded on an old 10.4 mac, so I took the files I need and head out for my trip with two FW800 RAID1 drives, the computer I had to use at my trip was a 10.6, I was able to use it no problem. And then when coming back the new footage was able to be read no problem. I actually would recommend doing this as apposed to having two drives and copying the information to each drive separately.

The hardware raid option would not have worked for me because I already had the drives and I could not take each drives separately, basically my company wanted someone else to take the backup hard drive on a different plane in case someone happens to one drive the other might be okay. But its my fault for not mentioning that.

Why are software raids not generally recommended? Is there a better way to but multiple external hard drives on a raid?

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MacPro Octo Core Intel Xenon 2.8Ghz 10GB DDR2 Ram
FCP 7.0.3
-I highly recommend el Gato Turbo264HD-

Ok with a software RAID, you're processor is being used to not only to run your OS but also your application(s), be it FCP or something else...this is true with an internal software RAID created through disk utility generally RAID 0 or 1 or with an external solution.

Your processor should be used for 2 things ideally, 1. Running your OS & 2. Running your applications.

In order to run a software RAID, you're going to use some of the processing power of your computer, although perhaps not as much with newer machines as as the case in the past.

The other problem with software RAID is you're running your software over software, if your OS crashes, that could be a potential problem & cause your software RAID to crash. You mentioned RAID 0, again, you'd be using some system resources from the processor to run it & get speed, but a crash means you could potentially lose everything.

This makes perfect sense. However I have used both apple Raid Utility(the one that controller the PCIe Apple Raid Card) and Apple Disk Utilities raid to move raids to different installs of the OS on different drives. The potential to lose everything is not just a problem for a software raid, a hardware raid has that same risk, which is why I keep backups on separate drives. For the RAID 1 Situation, Apple Disk Utility read a single drive without a problem on a computer that never set up the RAID in the first place. And I did not mention Raid 0 in this thread.

You've got many options for a hardware RAID 1, 2 bay FW 800 connected product, we have a product called the
SOHORAID SR2 for instance, that does an automatic RAID 1.

That's all well and good except that I already had extra drives and was not going to purchase another one. and need to carry each disk separately as I stated in my previous post.

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MacPro Octo Core Intel Xenon 2.8Ghz 10GB DDR2 Ram
FCP 7.0.3
-I highly recommend el Gato Turbo264HD-