Should I RAID or Fusion the SSDs?

LeandrodaFL said:

Lest say I get a MacMini and replace the HDD for 2x Sata III 480GB SSDs..

Should I RAID 0 them, of Fusion them?

My question is based on 2 things:

-TRIM support in RAID 0
-Can the logic board handle 2x 600mb/s?

Click to expand...

I don't know why you would fusion two SSD drives. The purpose of fusion is to move static under used data to the slower, larger HD. If both of your drives are fast either fusion wouldn't do anything, or perhaps worse would waste read/write cycles by moving this data to an equal SSD drive. I would RAID 0 them if you want performance and aren't worried about drive failure.

theanimala said:

I don't know why you would fusion two SSD drives. The purpose of fusion is to move static under used data to the slower, larger HD. If both of your drives are fast either fusion wouldn't do anything, or perhaps worse would waste read/write cycles by moving this data to an equal SSD drive. I would RAID 0 them if you want performance and aren't worried about drive failure.

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Fusion increases the risk of drive failure by the same amount as RAID 0. Backups are so simple to set up though these days, you'd be crazy not have one.

In your case raid is the way to go.

RAID-0 all the way ...

LeandrodaFL said:

Lest say I get a MacMini and replace the HDD for 2x Sata III 480GB SSDs..

Should I RAID 0 them, of Fusion them?

My question is based on 2 things:

-TRIM support in RAID 0
-Can the logic board handle 2x 600mb/s?

Click to expand...

If you use CoreStorage (diskutil cs from the terminal command line) to create a single logical volume consisting of the two SSDs together (which is *exactly* what you would do to Fusion them) then you can have the benefit of being able to use filevault on the single large logical volume, have a recovery partition, boot partition, and it will show trim enabled. You can't presently use file vault if you use the Raid approach to combine the two SSD's into one big one. Just sayin'.

By way of explanation, when corestorage is used to create logical volume consisting of an SSD and a larger HDD, the FusionDrive functionality is "automagically" applied to optimize performance. If the core storage logical volume consists simply of two SSDs then presumably no FusionDrive algorithms are applied. I run with with two SSD's combined into a single larger volume exactly this way.