I have a 512GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD drive and I was wondering if I can partition that into (2) 256GB drives and they RAID those 2 partitions together into RAID 0 to increase the performance of the drive. Is that possible and has anyone RAIDed 2 partition together? Thanks!
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Partitioning and RAID 0
- Thread starter garciausmc
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Yes, you can partition your SSD as you want, but you will not get any performance increase by RAIDing them back together (which is probably not possible anyway).
A RAID normally consists of two or more different HDDs or SSDs, not partitions, and a RAID 0 is getting a speed advantage via striping the data onto both disks and thus spreading the load and thus getting almost the most speed of either device thus almost doubling the speed.
If yo use one device with two partitions and want to RAID those two partitions, the load is still only on one device and there is no speed gain.
Is that understandable?
A RAID normally consists of two or more different HDDs or SSDs, not partitions, and a RAID 0 is getting a speed advantage via striping the data onto both disks and thus spreading the load and thus getting almost the most speed of either device thus almost doubling the speed.
If yo use one device with two partitions and want to RAID those two partitions, the load is still only on one device and there is no speed gain.
Is that understandable?
To shorten what simsaladimbamba explained. No it would not improve performance. As a matter of fact in that specific case, it might decrease performance as it now has the overhead of a raid 0 set without having multiple physical disks that would get you a speed increase using raid 0.
Awesome! Makes sense to me now that you both explained it. Thanks for providing the feedback. I didn't think it would but I was just checking cus I've never used RAID and I'm new to Mac so, Thanks!
The other thing to think about here is redundancy with RAID 0. You will have none if you were to stripe the drives together. In other words, if you striped them together into one drive, and you have the slightest bad sector on any of those drives, you have the potential to lose the entire RAID. What you would gain in space you would lose in redundancy in case one drive goes bad.
That's why RAID 0 is more of a 'use at your own risk'. You'd be better off leaving them separate drives altogether.
BL.