Can the Mac Mini have Raid 0 Samsung 830 Pros?

[l008com]

When I got my Mac mini Server 3+ years ago I immediately set it up in RAID 0 (I considered it really important for HDDs which would obviously be the system bottleneck). The advice at the time was not to do it because the software RAID in OS X was not considered reliable, especially for server use.

Turns out the software RAID was fine, but one of the drives did fail (bad sector) under warranty. The the problem was that the Apple store couldn't determine which one had failed but wouldn't replace them both. I had to un-RAID the drives and run the system until a failure occurred again. Took over a week to sort things out, with several restores from backups. Now it runs without RAID and frankly, with load spread out among 6 drives (9 TB total), there is no apparent loss in speed anyway.

Of course, there is no concern about warranties with the SSD installs, but just saying things might not be rosy!

That's a bummer. The utility "SMART Utility" could have told you in all of 3 seconds, which drive was failing, but for some reason Apple techs NEVER use this program. And since disk utility doesn't really check SMART data in any meaningful way, all they do is "guess" that a drive is failing based on behavior, rather than confirm it with a real, useful check of SMART data.
[doublepost=1509962771][/doublepost]Sorry to revive an ancient thread but I have a 2012 i7 Mac mini with an SSD/HDD setup. My SSD might be failing, but my HDD is going down like the titanic. I could replace both with the same setup I have now, 256 GB SSD & 1 TB HDD, all new. But I was thinking tow 500 GB SSD's in a fast raid config would be awesome. This mini has 6 GBit SATA, so in theory i should see speeds close to 1 GB/sec read and write

I've used fast raids, both built in and through SoftRAID for many years, but I haven't used any since SSDs came on the scene. I had countless G4 towers with dual-drive fast RAID configs. Gave a noticeable boost then. I'm hoping it will here too.

But I'm wondering if there are any other bottlenecks I might run in to? Like maybe the system bus can only talk to ALL SATA ports at a total of 6gbit/sec? Which would essentially slow down the fast raid to be more or less the same speed as a single ssd.

 

[MarkJames68]

If you’re doing sequential reads and writes you will get a big boost in raid 0. You won’t notice any improvement with random reads/writes. So generally it benches well but doesn’t speed up most tasks.

You can set up the raid through Disk Utility.

 

[talmy]

Sorry to revive an ancient thread but I have a 2012 i7 Mac mini with an SSD/HDD setup. My SSD might be failing, but my HDD is going down like the titanic. I could replace both with the same setup I have now, 256 GB SSD & 1 TB HDD, all new. But I was thinking tow 500 GB SSD's in a fast raid config would be awesome. This mini has 6 GBit SATA, so in theory i should see speeds close to 1 GB/sec read and write

I've used fast raids, both built in and through SoftRAID for many years, but I haven't used any since SSDs came on the scene. I had countless G4 towers with dual-drive fast RAID configs. Gave a noticeable boost then. I'm hoping it will here too.

Yep ancient thread. You might get a noticeable improvement in loading times of large programs and copying large files, but I never went back to RAID 0 on my mac Mini server. I've since replaced the server with a 2012 quad-core mini (bought when the 2014s came out) and have replaced the HDD in it, which failed, with a SSD. But most of the data being served is on non-raid external HDDs. Thousands of small files are on the SSD, where it is most beneficial.

 

[treekram]

I have RAID 0 on my 2012 i5 (2.5Ghz) MBP using 2 Samsung 850 Evo's. If you read/write large files, then it definitely helps. Otherwise, there's not that much of a difference. There's an app that I use to edit files created by a DVR box and when splitting a video in smaller videos or creating a video where I've edited out commericals, the RAID 0 setup is much faster (not 2X as fast) as compared to using a non-RAID setup. However, there is very little difference in exporting the file (to the same drive), even though there is minimal processing of the file (there's no compression when exporting the file - the raw file is some MPG format and the exported file is MP4). So that little bit of processing is enough to slow the overall performance to where the RAID 0 advantage is negligible. Similarly, I did benchmarks using the RAID 0 setup with a database application I have comparing the MBP to my 2012 Mini (2.6 Quad, the quad doesn't factor in since the application is not multi-threaded). In some cases the RAID setup was faster, in others, not.

But, all this being said, setting up RAID 0 is relatively easy for those who are knowledgeable. One thing to note (from what I've read - I don't have hands-on knowledge about this) is that if you have a pre-High Sierra RAID 0 setup - you can't migrate to High Sierra with AFPS and retain the RAID 0 - you'll need to do a clean install of High Sierra with AFPS and RAID 0 and then transfer files to it.