It took me a lot of time to research all of this so I thought that I'd spell out exactly what parts I used for my RAID 0 setup in a single post.
First of all, my Mac is a mid-2009 17" Macbook Pro. It came stock with a 5200 RPM 500GB drive that I had quickly filled due to a few virtual machines and a pretty extensive Aperture library. Wanting more disk space AND 7200 RPM made getting a larger drive more of a waiting game than a reality. Additionally I wanted a cost effective solution. Thus, I decided to get 2 500GB drives and building a striped array. After all, I seldom use my SuperDrive, I can live with an external solution.
I ended up playing it safe and stuck with 9.5mm drives. I'd heard that the 12.5mm drives do fit but I didn't want to order parts only to exchange them later. Besides, I could get exactly what I wanted in a 9.5mm drive anyway. The hard drives that I ended up going with were "Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive." I paid $59.99 for each drive with free shipping.
Next, I needed to find a drive caddy to replace the SuperDrive. I wanted something that would hold the drive in a secure manner and utilize the stock mounts if possible. During an extensive Ebay search I found exactly what I was looking for. It uses the stock MBP mounts and holds the drive in a very secure manner. It's typical China quality, as expected, but I can deal with lightweight plastic for a part such as this. After the initial install, I won't handle it much later anyway (other than future upgrades of course). You can't really tell by the seller's images but the drive bay fits exactly where the SuperDrive went and uses all of the same mounts that the SuperDrive did. Furthermore, it provides a mounting location for all of the stock hardware/wires that used to connect to the SuperDrive as well. Shipping was fast (about 9 days), the transaction was painless and it was pretty inexpensive ($19.99 + $5.99 shipping). I was pleasantly surprised since I'm pretty tentative when dealing with an overseas seller.
To replace my SuperDrive, I ended up getting a "Samsung USB 2.0 8x DVD Writer External Optical Drive for Mac and PC SE-S084C/RSBN." At only $46 shipped, I liked this much better than a cobbled together external case for my stock SuperDrive. Drive has worked very well. One gotcha though is playing DVD's via the DVD Player app. Although you can download other apps to do this, there is a pretty simple work around to "fix" this.
Once I got the hardware installed, I used an external SATA -> USB adapter that I had laying around the house with my old hard drive and booted off of it (hold "Option" during power on, choose your old drive and boot). I then initialized the drives and built my RAID 0 via Disk Utility. I then used SuperDuper to copy my old drive to my new RAID. This took about 4.5 hours to complete and my computer, while slow via USB, was fully usable during this period (although, I'd suggest just letting it be and waiting out the disk copy). After the copy was complete, my new RAID volume was made bootable and selected as the boot device. My Macbook then rebooted.
Upon reboot I was greeted with the dreaded "Circle-Slash." Grr... No problem, reboot via my old, USB connected, hard drive. Once booted, I launched System Preferences and selected the RAID volume as the boot device and rebooted. This worked as desired (initially my Mac was trying to boot from one drive or the other instead of the software RAID volume, by doing it this way, my MBP now saw, and booted from, the RAID volume as desired).
After fixing the boot "issue" I was greeted with a faster than usual system boot. Launching applications and performing disk intensive operations have been much more bearable. No longer do I sit and wait for Aperture to draw and redraw my 18 MP RAW images (.CR2's from my Canon 7d). Disk intensive operations on multi-Gig PhotoShop files have been much faster as well. I don't have any benchmarks but I was looking for real world performance, not hard numbers.
With the pair of 7200 RPM drives I have noticed a little more vibration in my case and just a touch more drive noise. Both of these are very minor and likely wouldn't have been noticeable had I not been looking for them. I haven't noticed an impact on battery life although I'm sure that there is some additional measurable drain. If you constantly push your battery to the limit, this may not be the best option for you. Heat has been a non issue as well. With a final cost under $200 this upgrade was well worth the effort.
Anyway, that's a quick (well maybe not so quick) overview on my RAID 0 configuration. Next project; 8GB RAM upgrade (I really should have done this when I had the case open, oh well)... I hope that this "guide" proves useful to others that are attempting the same upgrade. Please let me know if you have any questions.
First of all, my Mac is a mid-2009 17" Macbook Pro. It came stock with a 5200 RPM 500GB drive that I had quickly filled due to a few virtual machines and a pretty extensive Aperture library. Wanting more disk space AND 7200 RPM made getting a larger drive more of a waiting game than a reality. Additionally I wanted a cost effective solution. Thus, I decided to get 2 500GB drives and building a striped array. After all, I seldom use my SuperDrive, I can live with an external solution.
I ended up playing it safe and stuck with 9.5mm drives. I'd heard that the 12.5mm drives do fit but I didn't want to order parts only to exchange them later. Besides, I could get exactly what I wanted in a 9.5mm drive anyway. The hard drives that I ended up going with were "Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive." I paid $59.99 for each drive with free shipping.
Next, I needed to find a drive caddy to replace the SuperDrive. I wanted something that would hold the drive in a secure manner and utilize the stock mounts if possible. During an extensive Ebay search I found exactly what I was looking for. It uses the stock MBP mounts and holds the drive in a very secure manner. It's typical China quality, as expected, but I can deal with lightweight plastic for a part such as this. After the initial install, I won't handle it much later anyway (other than future upgrades of course). You can't really tell by the seller's images but the drive bay fits exactly where the SuperDrive went and uses all of the same mounts that the SuperDrive did. Furthermore, it provides a mounting location for all of the stock hardware/wires that used to connect to the SuperDrive as well. Shipping was fast (about 9 days), the transaction was painless and it was pretty inexpensive ($19.99 + $5.99 shipping). I was pleasantly surprised since I'm pretty tentative when dealing with an overseas seller.
To replace my SuperDrive, I ended up getting a "Samsung USB 2.0 8x DVD Writer External Optical Drive for Mac and PC SE-S084C/RSBN." At only $46 shipped, I liked this much better than a cobbled together external case for my stock SuperDrive. Drive has worked very well. One gotcha though is playing DVD's via the DVD Player app. Although you can download other apps to do this, there is a pretty simple work around to "fix" this.
Once I got the hardware installed, I used an external SATA -> USB adapter that I had laying around the house with my old hard drive and booted off of it (hold "Option" during power on, choose your old drive and boot). I then initialized the drives and built my RAID 0 via Disk Utility. I then used SuperDuper to copy my old drive to my new RAID. This took about 4.5 hours to complete and my computer, while slow via USB, was fully usable during this period (although, I'd suggest just letting it be and waiting out the disk copy). After the copy was complete, my new RAID volume was made bootable and selected as the boot device. My Macbook then rebooted.
Upon reboot I was greeted with the dreaded "Circle-Slash." Grr... No problem, reboot via my old, USB connected, hard drive. Once booted, I launched System Preferences and selected the RAID volume as the boot device and rebooted. This worked as desired (initially my Mac was trying to boot from one drive or the other instead of the software RAID volume, by doing it this way, my MBP now saw, and booted from, the RAID volume as desired).
After fixing the boot "issue" I was greeted with a faster than usual system boot. Launching applications and performing disk intensive operations have been much more bearable. No longer do I sit and wait for Aperture to draw and redraw my 18 MP RAW images (.CR2's from my Canon 7d). Disk intensive operations on multi-Gig PhotoShop files have been much faster as well. I don't have any benchmarks but I was looking for real world performance, not hard numbers.
With the pair of 7200 RPM drives I have noticed a little more vibration in my case and just a touch more drive noise. Both of these are very minor and likely wouldn't have been noticeable had I not been looking for them. I haven't noticed an impact on battery life although I'm sure that there is some additional measurable drain. If you constantly push your battery to the limit, this may not be the best option for you. Heat has been a non issue as well. With a final cost under $200 this upgrade was well worth the effort.
Anyway, that's a quick (well maybe not so quick) overview on my RAID 0 configuration. Next project; 8GB RAM upgrade (I really should have done this when I had the case open, oh well)... I hope that this "guide" proves useful to others that are attempting the same upgrade. Please let me know if you have any questions.
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