SSD RAID in Mac Pro 2006/07

[SuperMatt]

I saw a recent article from Low End Mac with speed tests of different RAID configurations in a Mac Pro 1,1 or 2,1. Now I just have to learn how to make a RAID using the command line interface, since I'm on El Capitan, which has the crippled Disk Utility.

 

[Juicy Box]

I currently have a Mac Pro 1,1 running MacOS 10.9 on a SSD boot drive. I am also interested in doing a RAID0 SSD boot drive.

I currently have 1 bay with an SSD, 2 bays with two 3TB HDDs in RAID0, and another HDD for back up purposes.

I am pretty sure that I have the bootdrive in RAID0 with HDDs in the past, but I also thought I read that MacOS wouldn't boot on software RAID0. Someone recently posted their older iMac with a software RAID of SSDs, and they assured me that it can be done.

Were you going to do 2, 3, or 4 SSD RAID?

I just have to learn how to make a RAID using the command line interface, since I'm on El Capitan, which has the crippled Disk Utility.

If you have an old back up, can you not just boot from it to do the software RAID in the older Disk Utility??

Or, if you have another Mac with an older OS, maybe you can put the Mac Pro in target disk mode and use the Disk Utility on the other Mac.

 

[jbarley]

I currently have a Mac Pro 1,1 running MacOS 10.9 on a SSD boot drive. I am also interested in doing a RAID0 SSD boot drive.

I currently have 1 bay with an SSD, 2 bays with two 3TB HDDs in RAID0, and another HDD for back up purposes.

I am pretty sure that I have the bootdrive in RAID0 with HDDs in the past, but I also thought I read that MacOS wouldn't boot on software RAID0. Someone recently posted their older iMac with a software RAID of SSDs, and they assured me that it can be done.

Were you going to do 2, 3, or 4 SSD RAID?



If you have an old back up, can you not just boot from it to do the software RAID in the older Disk Utility??

Or, if you have another Mac with an older OS, maybe you can put the Mac Pro in target disk mode and use the Disk Utility on the other Mac.

Or you can download and use Yosemite's Disk Utility modified for El-Capitan from a link in this thread.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...w-disk-utility-want-the-old-one-back.1938136/

 

[SuperMatt]

Or you can download and use Yosemite's Disk Utility modified for El-Capitan from a link in this thread.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...w-disk-utility-want-the-old-one-back.1938136/

Thanks for this tip! To answer vertical smile, I think a 2-SSD RAID 0 seems the most cost-effective, at least based on the results from the Low End Mac article. The 4-SSD option seems only about 25% faster than the 2-SSD one.

 

[shaunp]

Guys, don't use RAID 0 for a boot drive. It offers no redundancy whatsoever. Use RAID 1 if you must boot from RAID. The only time I would use RAID 0 is you have an app that requires a level of performance that can only be acheived by RAID 0. With SSD however this is unlikely.

 

[Juicy Box]

Guys, don't use RAID 0 for a boot drive. It offers no redundancy whatsoever. Use RAID 1 if you must boot from RAID. The only time I would use RAID 0 is you have an app that requires a level of performance that can only be acheived by RAID 0. With SSD however this is unlikely.

I think you are missing the point. I am sure that anyone that is posting about RAID0 as a boot drive understands that they are looking for a faster boot drive, not redundancy. You can always create cloned backups incase you have a SSD failure on your RAID0.

Besides, the goal that the OP wants is to do is cheaply increase the speed of Mac Pro's boot drive.

Using SSDs RAID1 for redundancy would make it slightly slower than just using a single SSD. All while doubling the cost.
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Thanks for this tip! To answer vertical smile, I think a 2-SSD RAID 0 seems the most cost-effective, at least based on the results from the Low End Mac article. The 4-SSD option seems only about 25% faster than the 2-SSD one.

If you wanted a little more speed, but didn't want to pay for 4 Drives, the 3 SSD RAID0 would probably have results closer to the 4 SSD RAID0, than just the two drive.

Of course this is 50% more of the cost, for probably around 20% increased speed.

This is assuming that you have a drive in mind already, because if you get 3 smaller/cheaper SSDs, you could probably get around the same total storage, for around the same price. Just about 20% faster.

 

[jbarley]

I am pretty sure that I have the bootdrive in RAID0 with HDDs in the past, but I also thought I read that MacOS wouldn't boot on software RAID0. Someone recently posted their older iMac with a software RAID of SSDs, and they assured me that it can be done.

As the OP indicates they are running OSX El-Capitan, I can say from experience that El-Cap will boot and run from an Apple software raid0 volume, but it does not allow for a Recovery partition.