MBP 15" running 2 x Hybrid Drives in RAID 0 v SSD, 6 months on.

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OzCreations Author

Level 1

23 points

MBP 15" running 2 x Hybrid Drives in RAID 0 v SSD, 6 months on.

Well it's been about 6 months since I upgraded my MBP.

Upgraded config:

2010 MBP 15" i7, 4GB RAM

+

2 x 500gb 7200rpm / 4GB NAND SSD hybrid drives. (one installed in the super bay with adapter).

+

1 x External samsung Superdrive when required.

This gives me:

1TB of usable disk space, based on the 2 drives running as a RAID 0 striped array, with the hardware supporting 8GB of NAND flash, and the rest normal disk.

The USB superdrive is plug and play when I require it, so far about twice.

Outcome:

A super fast 1TB disk that is very cost effective when compare to pure SSD. No problems to report other than a slightly shortened battery life from 7 hours to about 4-5 depending on usage. Striped disks are more vunrable to data loss as I have two phisical disks compared to two, but I backup with timemachine to NAS regularly. Total cost was about $300AUD. I would recommend this solution to anyone wanting 1TB+ of disk space in a MBP that can support two disks. It's very very fast, and the throughput (transfer rate) is famtastic. One of the hybrid drives alone is very good, but for the price pure SSD can't touch it.

The upgrade preocess was very easy, and did not even require rebuilding from scratch, all I did was take the origional HDD out, install the 2 new ones, then boot from the old HDD via USB, Configure the 2 new disks as an array with the disk untility, then using a clone tool like CCC copy the old drive to new drives. reboot, done.

If your looking to get more speed from your MBP and are consitering SSD, then this is worth consideration.

Macbook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.3)

Posted on Sep 8, 2011 5:39 PM

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Answer 1

ds store

Level 7

30,725 points

Sep 8, 2011 6:23 PM in response to OzCreations

I ran a RAID 0 as boot drive in my PowerMac G5 for many years, I always kept two hold option bootable clones on standby.

Booting off the machine was faster, but the OS and even programs still had to initialize, they didn't appear instantly.

Loading of programs didn't make too much of a difference as they were small, a lot of benefit seemed to occur when I cloned the drive to another RAID 0 as the second drive had to be just as fast as the first to realize any benefit of the speed in transferring files, else it defaults to the slowest drive speed.

Running of programs for the most part didn't make too much difference, unless I had huge files to open or duplicate, then the fast boot drive kicked in. But it was like driving a race car in downtown New York, racing to the next light just to stop, then race to the next light and stop again. Without a always huge road of data for it to run fast with, it was pretty much worthless.

If I multi-tasked with my huge 30" monitor, having a couple of TV's on, web, email , music playing and other programs, the faster RAID 0 boot drive came in handy. However I learned over time, that I was comfortable with running only one or two programs at the same time. Having ten programs, 6 TV channels on, ripping DVD's on the side and all that was too much to handle all the time.

The older machines like mine were limited by RAM of 4GB, so that's why a fast boot drive made such a difference as there was a lot of caching of memory to the drive.

These new 2011 MacBook Pro's have really fast i7's and the ability (Apple says only 8GB) to have a max of 16GB of RAM (price is still up there about $900 and coming down)

Lots of RAM, no need to swap.

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Answer 2

OzCreations Author

Level 1

23 points

Sep 9, 2011 4:45 PM in response to ds store

I guess I got sick of the hard disk speed issues when using iMovie and the like, having 400GB of video on my mbp ment tasks like re-index took for ever, even opening iMovie was tedious. Lightroom was the same, and a simple task like backing up the catologue upon exiting was dreaded.

I hardly ever find the CPU a bootleneckm it was allways the disk, and for what I do, 8GB would not help as much as RAID 0. IMO CPU's particually the i7 Quad core with HT is leaps ahead of the rest of the hardware, and for apps based around video and imaging, it's not likly to be your problem, unless your into 3D rendering 🙂

If you want to video edit on a MBP, you need lots of space, and the faster the better.

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