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2 x Intel SSD as boot volume (RAID0) configuration for March 2009 Mac Pro?

Boneoh said:
I have an Intel x25-m as my boot and application drive in my 09 MP. No issues at all so far. Application startup times are very fast. 😀

Your mileage may vary...
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Boneoh, have you tried, or could you try, installing Windows with boot camp on the X25 on your 09 MP? Any of XP, Vista or Win 7 would do.

I have a X25 and am trying to figure out why this does not work on the macbook, macbook pro, imac and mini. The only mac I have heard that this works on is a 06 MP.
If it works on the 09 MP maybe there is hope we will see an (EFI?) update for the other models.
 
TechViking said:
Boneoh, have you tried, or could you try, installing Windows with boot camp on the X25 on your 09 MP? Any of XP, Vista or Win 7 would do.

I have a X25 and am trying to figure out why this does not work on the macbook, macbook pro, imac and mini. The only mac I have heard that this works on is a 06 MP.
If it works on the 09 MP maybe there is hope we will see an (EFI?) update for the other models.
Click to expand...

Hi, TechViking. I have not tried BootCamp at all. I am using VMware Fusion now, used to use Parallels.

I will see what it takes to setup BootCamp with a quick XP install. Have never gone to Vista, my daughter's Dell has had way too many headaches for me to invest any time there. No need for Win 7 yet for me. Stay tuned for more info...🙂
 
UMBP 17 2.93 w/ a single X25-e Xbench disktest = 367.32

http://db.xbench.com/comparesubindex.xhtml?machineTypeID=40&sort=score&minVersion=1.3

BTW: my highest disk score was in excess of 380, but I can't find that incomplete score for some reason. The problem is, the X25-E performs best, and scores best, under heavy load. The heavier the load, the better the score. I've seen 272 READs and in excess of 200 WRITEs (from 2-100 MB -- flat line; I proposed elsewhere that the X25-E was saturating the bus and thus the flat line across such a large sampling of chunk sizes).

Check the preceding scores closely -- they suggest that the only other machines that have scored better than mine are Mac Pro(s) -- I would imagine that those scores are in the low, low range for the mighty-mighty Mac Pro. My scores are 7, 8 and 9. I really wanted to go with a Mac Pro, but I have to be mobile. I've been using this drive for about two months and this UMBP is the third computer its been in.

I'm not so much into boot time as I am into IOPs and multi-tasking, workstation type performance. I have placed all data, non OS native apps and my home folder, all properly symlinked, on an external four disk array (2.5") and use a Tempo Sata Pro Expresscard/34 (Marvell chip with 200 MB/s throughput -- hey, it ain't a Mac Pro). On Tuesday or Wednesday I'll be receiving my second X25-E and setting them up, you guessed it, as a RAID 0 boot drive (the UMBP(s) can use a drive sled in the place of the optical drive). They're cheaper now ($411.00 to $450.00). Not intending to join any fight, just thought that an X25-E putting up such scores in a UMBP indicates that its performance would be frightening in a Mac Pro.
 
Boneoh said:
Hi, TechViking. I have not tried BootCamp at all. I am using VMware Fusion now, used to use Parallels.

I will see what it takes to setup BootCamp with a quick XP install. Have never gone to Vista, my daughter's Dell has had way too many headaches for me to invest any time there. No need for Win 7 yet for me. Stay tuned for more info...🙂
Click to expand...

That would be great, thanks. It should not take all that long to figure out if the Windows installation will work or not, if it fails it will fail a few minutes into the installation when one chooses which drive to install Windows on. If the X25-M is the only drive installed you will get the "'Setup did not find any hard disk drive installed on your computer" error message, and if there are other drives installed the X25-M will simply not be listed to choose from.
 
TechViking said:
That would be great, thanks. It should not take all that long to figure out if the Windows installation will work or not, if it fails it will fail a few minutes into the installation when one chooses which drive to install Windows on. If the X25-M is the only drive installed you will get the "'Setup did not find any hard disk drive installed on your computer" error message, and if there are other drives installed the X25-M will simply not be listed to choose from.
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Hi, TechViking!

Well, the verdict is in. I was able to successfully install XP Pro SP 2 on the 09 MP using Boot Camp. I has a few misadventures along the way.

First, I neglected to RTFM! Even after I printed it!!!! 😱 THe instructions clearly state that you MUST format the partition with the Windows installer. I missed that and had to start over.

When I rebooted into OS X, the Boot Camp docs started printing again! Argh, who knows why. 🙁

The second install went fine, I formatted the partition as instructed. Once I finally got into XP, I made my second mistake. At that point, you are supposed to install the OS X boot camp stuff under Windows. I grabbed the Leopard DVD from 10.5.6 that I bought for upgrading my old MacBook Pro. I should have used the Leopard DVD that came with the new Mac Pro! 😱 I'm not 100% sure, but I think this caused my Windows network settings to not recognize the built-in network adapter.

All in all, this was a fine experiment, but I am out of time. I will just leave you all with phrase that a former coworker used to say all the time:

Good luck to us with all of this! 🙂

I think there is a little something lost in the translation of this, he was a Russian fellow.
 
Boneoh said:
Hi, TechViking!

Well, the verdict is in. I was able to successfully install XP Pro SP 2 on the 09 MP using Boot Camp. I has a few misadventures along the way.
Click to expand...

Ok! Thanks for this. Just want to verify that this was on the actual X25-M and not some other drive that you might have installed also? 🙂
 
Best disk test for my UMBP w/ single X25-E = 446.51-- see the link below

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=354800;

I am quite curious to see what the RAID array will do. I had to tax it all to h**l to get that score, but I was curious whether I was right about it performing better under a heavy load. I can say, w/o violating my NDA, that SL screams on this thing. Now if only I could get Sonnet to release 64-bit drivers for Tempo Sata Pro Expresscard/34...
 
Not a macpro but using X25

I have a Macbook with a single X25-M.

1. Boot Camp does not work with FIRST run hard drives (not sure how to tell, I don't use BC, only VMWARE). 160GB are NOT affected by the EFI bootloader bug.

2. New firmware 8820 is out. Defrag issue is dead.

I am removing the superdrive and putting in a 2nd X25-M and then going to RAID 0 them. I save my work to a shared drive when I am done but can be running 5-8 applications at the same time.

I never use the superdrive and do not store files on my laptop. I am strictly doing this for usability. I only have room for 2 drives 🙂
 
Finally getting ready to get the second X-25!

What's the optimal stripe size for 2 drives?

Intel has both 7 and 9.5 mm thick X-25s. I have the thicker one. How similar do Raid0 drives need to be?
 
Just ordered two 80gb x25-m's for my early 08 octo. 😀

I also bought the Pro Caddy 2 from transintl so I can install them in the 5.25" bay, hopefully I'll be able to raid 0 them and boot from them connected to the extra sata ports without problems.

If anyone's interested in the Pro Caddy 2 I'll take pics of the installation, I couldn't find any decent pics or reviews of it online.
 
2x Intel X25-M 160GB in MacBookPro5,1

photo-feed.jpg


These are the results for 2x 160GB in 32K Stripe RAID0

Xbench:
picture_27.png


QuickBench Standard Test:
picture_38.png



QuickBench Sequential Test:
picture_39.png


ZoneBench IOPS Test:
picture_40.png


Will post results for 64K stripe later..
 
Thanks for sharing... (although the order in which you posted the screen caps makes them difficult to compare)... it seems like they are very similar which is not surprising I guess... the difference is probably not noticeable in the real-world.
 
poppap said:
This is all the results..

picture_47.png
Click to expand...

XBench makes no sense to me... reading or writing 4K chunks of data with a stripe size that's bigger should make no difference whether it's 16K or 256K.

The QuickBench results seem reasonable in that a smaller stripe is able to better leverage parallelism in more circumstances (smaller chunks of data will benefit from the stripping not just larger chunks).

If I recall, the trade-off in stripe size for magnetic media was that a smaller stripe improved parallelism at the expense of more seek times (due to the head moving around the disk more). With SSD's the seek time is negligible and there's no performance hit for using a smaller stripe size.

This is a great realization... SSD's RAID0 arrays can run smaller strip sizes with no negative consequences. I'm interested in what other's think... Nanofrog? 😛
 
More said:
The internet is full of people with opinions based on other people's opinions.

2x Intel X25-Ms as a boot volume (RAID-0) is nothing short of SPECTACULAR!
Click to expand...
The internet is also full of people who think their own opinions are better or more accurate than other peoples opinions, yet still based on speculation... Give it a rest already.
 
VirtualRain said:
If I recall, the trade-off in stripe size for magnetic media was that a smaller stripe improved parallelism at the expense of more seek times (due to the head moving around the disk more). With SSD's the seek time is negligible and there's no performance hit for using a smaller stripe size.

This is a great realization... SSD's RAID0 arrays can run smaller strip sizes with no negative consequences. I'm interested in what other's think... Nanofrog? 😛
Click to expand...
Sorry it took so long to reply, I actually missed this earlier. 😱

I try to stay away from small stripes on mechanical drives. Too much loss in throughput just to eek out a little more capacity. But I'm impatient.. I want RESULTS NOW. 😀 😛

This is a nice revelation, as the capacity is rather smallish on SSD's. Maxing out the capacity usage while retaining the throughput is well,...NICE. 😀

It would be a nice experiment, err... excuse to pick up a pair 😀, but I'll wait for the prices to come down yet.
 
nanofrog said:
Sorry it took so long to reply, I actually missed this earlier. 😱

I try to stay away from small stripes on mechanical drives. Too much loss in throughput just to eek out a little more capacity. But I'm impatient.. I want RESULTS NOW. 😀 😛

This is a nice revelation, as the capacity is rather smallish on SSD's. Maxing out the capacity usage while retaining the throughput is well,...NICE. 😀

It would be a nice experiment, err... excuse to pick up a pair 😀, but I'll wait for the prices to come down yet.
Click to expand...

I just got my pair of X-25M SSD's... what would be a good test to evaluate the effects of stripe size?
 
VirtualRain said:
I just got my pair of X-25M SSD's... what would be a good test to evaluate the effects of stripe size?
Click to expand...
Create the same array type and the same capacity, using different stripe sizes (the only setting that should be changed). Test the throughput for each stripe size. Examine the the final results, and please post them. 😀 A 2 drive RAID 0 would be particularly attractive for boot useage, and a few members would likely be interested. 😱 😛

It would certainly be nice to see. 😉
 
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