Can I increase my MBPs performance by replacing my optical drive with another SSD?

[Suno]

I'm vaguely aware of terms like RAID 0 and whatnot, but I don't know the specifics on a technical level and the conditions required.

I want to replace the optical drive on my MBP and replace it with another SSD, but I want to maximize performance out of the transition, if there's anything out of it that I can benefit from other than added storage space. Quick research led me to RAID 0, which I understand essentially doubles the speed of your read/write at the risk of losing it all in the case that one of the harddrives fail.

Before I get too deep into that, I was wondering what other benefits I can get out of a double SSD setup, if anything at all. I'm trying to make the most out of it.

Second is if RAID 0 is all I can do on a home-usage level, are there certain conditions that need to be met? For example, do they both need to be the same size SSD or same manufacturer, etc.?

 

[maflynn]

Yes, RAID 0 will help with performance, but not as much as when hard drives roamed the wild. Back then RAID 0, helped with drive latency and sending the data to two different controllers. Now there's no latency so the improvement will not be as drastic.

There's also the risk of data loss, you incur any data corruption, you lose your entire RAID volume because your data is spread across two drives.

What are your tasks that you need RAID 0?

 

[maratus]

RAID 0 with SSDs is absolutely pointless unless you specifically need sequential speed (i.e. work with RAW video footage from your internal drive). It does, however, increase your chances to lose data in case of SSD controller failure.

If you want to increase performance and make it cost-efficient, I'd recommend to buy a higher speed SSD like Samsung 850 PRO (256GB) as a system drive + a cheaper SSD like Samsung 840 EVO (1TB) or Crucial M500 (960TB) for data storage.

 

[Anitramane]

If you do Raid 0 I would strongly advise you to get a couple of hard drives to do daily backups to. At least 2 backup drives, in case one fails.

Keep them encrypted so that no one looks at your data when you don-t have physical access to the drives.

 

[glenthompson]

You didn't mention which MBP you have. Some models have problems with a SSD in the optical bay. Beyond that, I doubt that you will see much of a performance gain with Raid 0. As Mike mentioned, latency delays are eliminated and unless you're doing large reads where the data can be spread across both drives then there will be no improvement.

If you need more space then go for it. If you go Raid 0 you better have an excellent backup plan in place. While small, you've doubled your chances of a drive failure.