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unkinkedash

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 21, 2018
14
0
Hello everybody, I'm considering exchange my MacBook Pro mid 2012 A1278 HDD for an SSD and also exchange its optic reader for another SSD. Than, use RAID 0 for a better performance. Is this a good idea? Thanks!
 

slam5

macrumors member
Jan 22, 2011
50
13
Hello everybody, I'm considering exchange my MacBook Pro mid 2012 A1278 HDD for an SSD and also exchange its optic reader for another SSD. Than, use RAID 0 for a better performance. Is this a good idea? Thanks!

Don’t think you can os x don’t implement RAID this way...
 

Erasmus

macrumors 68030
Jun 22, 2006
2,756
300
Australia
Any particular reason? Are you commonly duplicating files that are dozens of gigabytes in size?

Really, I don't think it's worth it. You'd be better off with a HDD + SSD, and getting more storage space for less money.

If you're coming to SSDs from HDDs, the performance difference will be huge. Going to RAID SSDs is unlikely to give you a noticeable improvement except in very rare scenarios.
 
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jerryk

macrumors 604
Nov 3, 2011
7,421
4,208
SF Bay Area
Your SSD interface is limited to SATA 2 at under 300MB/sec. If you really want to go faster get a 2012-2015 rmbp unit. They start at 550 MB/sec and top out at 2,000 MB/sec.
 

treekram

macrumors 68000
Nov 9, 2015
1,849
411
Honolulu HI
Both 2012 MBP non-Retina SATA ports run at SATA3. However, OWC put a warning that sometimes the optical port doesn't do SATA3 on the 2012 model. That warning was added in 2016 or 2017 (there's a post of mine somewhere that has an approximate date based on what's available on one of the web-archive sites). My 2012 MBP optical port does SATA3 and I haven't seen posts from people who can't get SATA3 on the optical port.

As for RAID0, I have this setup on my 2012 MBP with 2x Samsung 850 Evo's. This is from a post I did earlier:

In order to really take advantage of the higher RAID0 speeds (keep in mind RAID0 in this case is implemented through software), you need to have use cases where you are copying large files on the SSD. Otherwise, you're not likely to see much human-observed difference. Many times when an app writes a large file, it has to do some processing so it's not an uninterrupted flow of bytes to the disk. So, in that case if the speed of the non-RAID0 is faster than what the app can push, there's no advantage to RAID0. Also, the RAID0 blocks I believe are 32K. So any file smaller than that won't be split between the RAID0 disks.

It just so happens that I have an app (DVR editing program) where if you want to compact a recording (getting rid of commercials) or if you want to splice up a large recording into smaller ones, it will do very little processing and do mainly a file copy and in this case, it's much (not 2x, but noticeably faster) than on my computer which has a SSD but no RAID. If you have a use case where this applies, then RAID0 may help. I also tried a database app that I have where I have operations that may take awhile (anywhere to 10+ seconds to several minutes). There wasn't a clear advantage to RAID0 for this particular use case of mine.
 
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