Crucial M4 Raid0 in OWC Mercury Elite Enclosure - Trim?

[yongy]

hi all!

As per title, i have a few qu's about the setup.

Firstly, has anyone played around with the specific OWC enclosure and tried it with 2 ssds? the ones im interested are Crucial M4s.

Secondly, does TRIM work on hardware Raids? Believe read somewhere that it the hardware controller has to support it. Does the OWC one?

Background: using the current enclosure with 2 x F1 7200rpm drives for video editing (FCPX) with the esata connection on my 2011 imac (esata hack). its definitely fast enough, but as have been gifted with 2x 256gb m4's thought it would be good to get a blistering fast setup. Scrubbing and loading of projects does take time, sometimes...

Cheers!

PS. i know the dangers of raid etc. I will have constant backup as will be working on one project at a time.

 

[velocityg4]

I assume you are talking about the Mercury Elite Pro RAID.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEPQ946QL2/
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEPQ946QL2K/

TRIM does work on hardware RAID if the controller supports it. Since OWC does not specifically mention that TRIM is supported I wouldn't count on it being supported. Also it uses the Oxford 946 chipset which does not mention TRIM support in its literature so I highly doubt there is TRIM support.

I assume you are intending to use RAID 0. In which case you would not get the full benefits of RAID 0 using a single eSATA 3.0 connection that the Mercury Elite Supports. Since a single M4 is easily able to saturate SATA II's theoretical 375MB/s in read operations.

There might be some sort of boost in write operations using RAID 0. Given the apparent age of the enclosure. I doubt it would get any real boost. It doesn't even support USB 3.0.

From what I can tell there are no RAID enclosures that support eSATA 6gb/s. At least within a consumer budget. Nor do the sparse Thunderbolt enclosures support TRIM.

 

[yongy]

hi velocityg4

yep, that is the enclosure i am using. guess, not toooo worried about TRIM as i will wipe the drives after each project and that "should" get the drive healthy again...

guess the issue is that i need the size of 2x256gb raid0 ssds and cant afford a single 512gb at the mo... cant wait till TB enclosures become cheaper!!

maybe this is best placed in the "video" forum, but what do you think of my current setup and ways to improve for video editing:

1x 60gb ssd (OS,apps) sata port
1x 256gb (video editing) sata port
1x raid0 (video editing) esata hack

1xFW800 enclosure (home folder and files)

the fw800 is taking its time when accessing files, so would ideally like to place that back on a sata port. also have the extra 256gb that i would like to use!

any help would be great!

 

[MrX8503]

I would put your fastest and largest SSDs inside your iMac instead of having them external.

Put your dual M4 inside your iMac and Raid0 them. I'm not sure if the 2011 iMacs have Sata 3, but I would check that out.

 

[yongy]

yep the 2011 imacs have 2 sata III ports. yea i think thats probably the best way although the other port can only then be used for either os 60gb sss or home folder 1tb Samsung F1...

obviously then the esata enclosure is kinda obsolete..

 

[MrX8503]

Looks like the iMac has 2x SATAIII and 1x SATAII.

You want your M4s on the SATAIII so that you get the full 500MB/s read rate from those drives. You can raid0 it for 1GB/s, but you may not notice real world gains from that and TRIM may not work.

For the SATAII port, put your mechanical hard drive there. Not sure what you could do with the 60GB SSD. Maybe give/sell it away to a family member or something.