How to setup RAID 0 on my MacBook Pro with WD My Book Studio Edition II?

That can't be done.

RAID 0 is a waste of time even if you could do it.

1: Both drives have to be of the same size, make and on similar connections like internal SATA. You need a extra exact drive to replace one that fails.

2: You need to clone the present install to a external drive, boot from it, then create the RAID 0 and reverse clone.

3: You have to always maintain the clone with updates, as the RAID 0 will fail 2x faster than single spindle drives.

4: You'll see just about little improvement in 95% of your usage, except when copying very large data sets (50GB+) to another RAID 0 or external SSD on a Thunderbolt. As both have to be equally fast, or speed defaults to the slowest drive.

5: SSD's offer top speed and not as hazardous as RAID 0 with fragile hard drives. RAID 0 two SSD's is just too much speed that will never be used.

I've used a RAID 0 on my PowerMac G5 for many years, it's only fast as long as one is very highly productive, or doing a intense amount of video transfer work, even then it has to auto-cloned/updated nightly as it can fail one morning right out of the blue.

You can buy a external RAID 0 setup, try to use it on a Thunderbolt or Firewire 800 interface, clone OS X to it and hold the option key down to boot it and try it. You'll see it's really no difference in real day to day operations, but the tests will of course be awesome. Some Photoshop freaks do this as it's faster than their boot drive, it's called time shifting and/or "scratch disk", as every night they still have to back the RAID 0 up, but that can be done automatically.

However if your MBP is slow, there are some things you can do to speed it up, before or after installing a SSD.

Why is my computer slow?

How to properly defrag a Mac's hard drive

bobmermans wrote:

So I have the external hard drive installed now as RAID 0 HFS+, and I use it for backups and storage and that's the best way to use it?

Depends how much data you have to deal with.

RAID 0 means to stripe the data, one bit going to one drive, another bit going to another drive and so forth.

The more drives in the RAID 0 set, the faster the data can exit and enter the machine to how fast the interface is, to how fast the device accepting the data is.

Because the data path is striped, means one drive fails all the data is lost. So it's highly vulnerable to failure.

You can't RAID 0 one drive, it requires 2 or more of the same type drive and model, using the same interface on your Mac. So you can't use Firewire 400 and 800, or either with USB, or with Thunderbolt. You need to have each drive on FW 800 for instance, or use Thunderbolt and the external set does it's own RAID o.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/RAID/Desktop

As a boot drive it's insane and problematic, however as a external RAID 0 storage set of 2 drives in a prepackaged setup, it's useful if you have large files like video or big Photoshop files and don't want to hog your boot drive with them.

Still like I said, a auto-backup/clone of the RAID 0 storage set (2 or more drives) has to be backup up nightly.

You might be better off with a external SSD instead, no moving parts, or chosing a lot of drives, (like 5 + 1 extra) and use RAID 5 instead, as this is fast and also provides redundancy. One drive fails, take it out and replace with a spare, it's data is automatically rebuilt from the backups on the other drives.

RAID 5 is safer for large data sets and speed, provided a lot of drives are used.

The WD MyBook is managed from within the WD drive manager program.

You can set them up to be either

RAID 0 - striping, twice the storage but with no redundancy and twice the failure rate of a single disk,

or

RAID 1 - mirroring, duplicates data across drives with redundancy and much less expected failure rate.

These things are great, because they are very quiet compared to anything else I've seen on the market. WD support is not the greatest ... but whose is. They have eventually replaced two broken items I have had, but not been much technical help and do not really know how to opertate their own products.

One thing to note is that you lose your data on these if the box itself fails, as differentiated from either of the disks themselves ... you cannot get a new box and just drop your old good disks into it and expect it to work ... according to WD support and my own experience. Maybe they've fixed that, but I would not count on it. A WD RAID 0 failure rebuild is as simple as removing the old disk, dropping in a new one, and waiting for it to rebuild ... which can take a day or more under certain circumstances ... be patient.

Here is what I figure ... for me ... I am OK with using the striping, IF and only IF the data is backed up somewhere else. I got two of these boxes and use one for the data and the other for the TimeMachine backup. If two boxes as striped the chances of both of them going bad at the same time are remote ... but just to be safe it's good to have even another backup disk ... if your data is valuable to you.

Another scheme might be to get two of the same boxes, stripe them for storage and speed and use something to copy one to the other. That way if you do have a failure you can just remount or rename the backup box and you are up and running immediately without having to restore. Restoring or rebuilding a lot or data takes a long time there is no way around it.

DO NOT rely on the mirroring redudancy for backup, there is a more than good chance you will regret it.

I would also not get overly complex with these and try to mirror them and use them as RAID components in the Mac sense, that is configure them as separate RAID disk elements under Mac Control ... a failure will be almost impossible to debug and unsupported by either Apple of WD.

Another thing to note is that TimeMachine may end up biting you on these kinds of large disks. I bought an 8TB WD ThunderBolt RAID, which by the way appears as two separate disks to Apple's Disk Manager. As I filled it up with data past the 4TB point, TimeMachine would not backup saying that the backup set was not big enough to fit on my 4TB MyBook FireWire800 drive. If you get a large disk, be sure you have an equally large disk to back it up to ... at least if you are using TimeMachine.

Message was edited by: bruxxx

Hi Bob,

First thing, my comment was directed towards the previous non-ThunderBolt model of MyBook. The ThunderBolt model does not need to use the WD Drive Manager software. There is a setup, if I recall, but my understanding is that they use Apples RAID system, and the drives in the box show up differently, individually and in RAID sets, which all in all under Mavericks at least is like of ugly in Disk Utility, but it works fine.

> So, if I understand you right, you would advice me to

Also, I was speaking in general terms, so I was not advising anyone on specific issues, just speaking in a general way about backups, safety and being thoughtful, careful and very simple in how anyone sets up their system if they have data they do not want to lose.

> I still think indeed that relying on only one device will turn against me one day. A car with 1 flat tire also won't bring me home.

Yes, this is my exact point, you cannot use mirroring as a backup method, period. Even having another drive on the same system is not really a good backup method.

I am not sure that it matters that much how you connect your drive, but if you have two ThunderBolt ports it makes sense to put them on different ports I think. There are some systems that on the same bus can talk back and forth and even transfer data so they may be a plus to that, but these are so fast that to me it makes more sense to isolate them, especially if they are not really working together in some kind of unit.

The major point is to put a backup solution in place and test it - make sure you are writing what you want to write and that you can recover what you write. I would advice using TimeMachine, but be advised that with large datasets TimeMachine is a little quirky. I had a situation where I had an 8TB MyBook that my system would not backup to the smaller 6TB MyBook because they disk was not large enough. So, I had to rebuild my system with the larger disk as the backup disk.

I am not sure what you mean in your last paragraph about copy-pasting? For the error code use WD support, but be very careful about whatever they tell you to do because they will not be thinking about how important your data is as much as you are.