The hard drives you will be using as members of the RAID 0 striped set must first be erased. And since a RAID 0 set can be severely impacted by a drive failure, we’re going to take a little extra time and use one of Disk Utility’s security options, Zero Out Data, when we erase each hard drive.
When you zero out data, you force the hard drive to check for bad data blocks during the erasure process, and mark any bad blocks as not to be used. This decreases the likelihood of losing data due to a failing block on the hard drive. It also significantly increases the amount of time it takes to erase the drives from a few minutes to an hour or more per drive.
Erase the Drives Using the Zero Out Data Option
- Make sure the hard drives you intend to use are connected to your Mac and powered up.
- Launch Disk Utility, located at /Applications/Utilities/.
- Select one of the hard drives you will be using in your RAID 0 striped set from the list on the left. Be sure to select the drive, not the volume name that appears indented under the drive’s name.
- Click the ‘Erase’ tab.
- From the Volume Format dropdown menu, select ‘Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)’ as the format to use.
- Enter a name for the volume; I’m using StripeSlice1 for this example.
- Click the ‘Security Options’ button.
- Select the ‘Zero Out Data’ security option, and then click OK.
- Click the ‘Erase’ button.
- Repeat steps 3-9 for each additional hard drive that will be part of the RAID 0 striped set. Be sure to give each hard drive a unique name.
