Raid 0 boot volume

[Chippy99]

Please be gentle with me - I am new to macs!

But I am going to install 2 new 240gb ssd's in my 2011 mini. I don't do any super-critical work on my Mini, and I do backup my data, so I am not worried about potential data loss. So I figure I will configure the drives as a raid 0 array for maximum speed.

I have an external (bootable) osx Lion disk - basically a clone of my current internal disk. I plan on doing the following:

Set the external disk as the boot device
Power off and install the 2 new SSD's
Boot from the external disk
Create the new raid0 array
Carbon Copy the external disk over to the new SSD raid array
Set the raid array to be the boot device
Reboot from the raid array

Can I just check with you guys that the above will work?

Also, will I be able to use the Bootcamp assistant to create a bootcamp partition on the new raid0 array? Or even better, restore my existing bootcamp volume to the new array?

Any problems I should look out for?

Thanks in advance

 

[KScottMyers]

This is exactly what I did and "Yes" your method should work fine. I saw quite an increase in read and write performance going to a striped RIAD setup.

You won't be able to partition the drive though - can't do that on a RAID volume.

Other things: Repair Disk and Repair Permissions is not supported from the GUI on RAID volumes - use the command line.

Also - I believe FileVault does not work with RAID disks.

Have fun.

 

[Chippy99]

Thanks for the info.

Not being able to partition is a real pain - I hadn't realised that.

Do you know if you can partition Concatenated Disk Sets (instead of Raid 0 disk sets)?

The thing is, I need more than 256GB for my OSX installation, but I also need bootcamp to run some essential Windows apps. I didn't really research this thoroughly enough I guess, but I bought 2 x 240GB SSDs hoping to achieve this. I could have bought a single 500GB SSD, but that would have cost me 50%+ more and I figured not been as fast.

I guess I can run them as two separate disks, and partition one of them for my bootcamp installation. That would work and shouldn't be too difficult I guess.

 

[flatfoot]

Just split each drive into partitions of your liking and then RAID the partitions. This way it'll work.

 

[KScottMyers]

Thanks for the info.

Not being able to partition is a real pain - I hadn't realised that.

Do you know if you can partition Concatenated Disk Sets (instead of Raid 0 disk sets)?

The thing is, I need more than 256GB for my OSX installation, but I also need bootcamp to run some essential Windows apps. I didn't really research this thoroughly enough I guess, but I bought 2 x 240GB SSDs hoping to achieve this. I could have bought a single 500GB SSD, but that would have cost me 50%+ more and I figured not been as fast.

I guess I can run them as two separate disks, and partition one of them for my bootcamp installation. That would work and shouldn't be too difficult I guess.

As flatfoot suggests - setting up your RAID on partitions afterwards is a possibility. Check out this link for more info (Setting up a two-partition RAID volume). http://tinyurl.com/7ybuzlu

I just ran Windows in Parallels since the disk speed was just so much faster on a stripped RAID volume. This way I could more easily play with different Windows setups and not have to worry about hard partition sizes. If you're installing SATA III SSDs, things should really fly.

 

[philipma1957]

Just make sure you have proper backups. I do a raid0 with 2 lacie little big disks I have 3 256gb samsungs for a 768gb raid0 drive.

I also time machine it and clone it.

 

[Chippy99]

Thanks guys - really appreciate the info!

 

[dolphin842]

You could also do a 'lazy' RAID by putting OS X on one SSD and your user folder on the other. The speed increase likely won't be as dramatic, but when you're booting up and launching apps, the system will be grabbing resources from both drives.