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(4) SSD RAID0 - practical speeds?

S

sboerup

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 8, 2009
417
2
Call me crazy (don't), but I'm looking for extreme performance here. Not synthetic performance because I could care less, I need real world improvements.

I'm debating picking up 4 relatively smaller SSDs (40gb/60gb) from OWC to put them in a RAID0 array in my Mac Pro. This wouldn't be for boot either (already have that taken care of). This is for data manipulation (particularly large photos within Lightroom). Adobe Lightroom isn't the fastest beast and I'm looking for a way to speed it up, and overall system performance.

My other data drives are hooked up via eSATA.

So, would this yield me real world performance increase? Is (4) disks too much or should I just go with 2? Is OWC (sandforce controller) currently the best? I've read reports about the Vertex 2, but I read of a lot of failures on Newegg, and I personally had a Vertex drive and it failed twice on me. Should I wait for the next Intel drives? How much faster are the OWC vs Intel drives?

Would love any thoughts.
 
do you mean inside the pro with software raid0 if so 3 is more practical then four. the 4 bays inside a pro max at about 600MB/s so 3 is more then enough when it comes to ssd's.

there are complexities as to using the internal controller in the mac pro. if you use 3 ssd's it can use the full speed of the intel ICH10 CONTROLLER

Then your boot drive and your 4th drive bay won't have any overhead and throttling can occur.


You could use 4 Gen2 80gb intels in the 4 bays with better results,
because they are a bit slower and won't overwhelm the ICH10 Controller .
 
Last edited:
Yes, here is how I would have set it up:
-Boot drive is in the optical bay (120gb SSD right now)
-The RAID0 array would be the 4 standard bays

Thanks for the info on the 600mb/s for the internal bays. Yes, it would be a software RAID setup in OSX. Don't want to deal with controller cards.
 
The chipset in Mac Pro can only provide about 660MB/s so putting more than three SSDs in RAID 0 would not yield any performance improvements. I don't know would a PCIe (e)SATA card provide any better performance, maybe someone else has input on this.

However, random speeds don't scale up like sustained speeds do. Somehow 4 SSDs in RAID 0 sounds a bit overkill for Lightroom. IMO 2x120GB SSDs in RAID 0 would be enough and they wouldn't take all your HD bays
 
Thanks for the tips. Looks like (2) would be fast enough for all practical purposes. The new Intel's look crazy fast, so I'll be waiting. 450mb/s reads and 300mb/s writes? Thats CRAZY.
 
yes, if you not using any raid card, 3 ssd will reach the top. I'm just try few day ago, I'm using 3 *ssd OCZ Vertex 2, it just around 630 MB.
3ssdonboard.png
 
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