How to use two ssd drives in conjunction

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How to use two ssd drives in conjunction

I replaced my old hdd with a new ssd about two years ago. I could only afford a 120 GB drive at the time, so as you can imagine, it really managed to fill up. Now, there’s only 9 GB available left on that original ssd. I purchased another ssd, this time a 250 GB (both drives are Electra 6G from owc) using the owc data doubler package which allows you to expand your storage by replacing the optical drive with an ssd. I would like to use both of these drives together to bring back some of the speed my MacBook Pro was missing. How can best use these two drives to increase my laptop speed?

Posted on Apr 20, 2018 5:26 PM

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Answer 1

Apr 20, 2018 5:43 PM in response to Bartelbee

The 250 will already be faster. Make it your new boot drive. Use it for System, Applications, and Paging files.

Think about things you may do that would fight over the disk drive, and move some of those to the second drive.

Do not be tempted by the siren-song of creating a Striped RAID out of two SSD drives. It adds enormous complexity, precludes having a Recovery partition, and crates a very fragile drive that, if anything fails, ALL the data on both drives become unsalvageable.

Since that comes up as an issue, you also need to have a Trusted Backup. Do you? How current is it? If you lose your drive during the changeover, will you lose everything?

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Answer 2

Apr 21, 2018 6:11 AM in response to Bartelbee

Pretty much.

The other way you could do it is to combine them into a Concatenated Drive set, also called "just a bunch of Drives" or JBOD, which means you no longer have to decide what-goes-where, and you just use it as if it were one big drive.

Those are not delicate, and have fewer restrictions. But you do not get to decide which stuff is speeded up by not being on the same drive as the System.

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Answer 3

Bartelbee Author

Level 1

8 points

Apr 20, 2018 8:39 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I have a 1TB external hard drive for a backup. So I just throw stuff on the non-startup drive and manually try to keep each drive from filling?

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How to use two ssd drives in conjunction

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