Dual OCZ Vertex 2 3.5's in RAID0 for Snow Leopard boot?

[Need for Speed]

I have a 2009 Mac Pro with a 4-drive WD RE4 RAID0 that I'm pretty happy with for data like iTunes, movies, etc. I would like to remove my optical and use the two drive bays to run a boot AND user data disk, with dual 3.5" OCZ Vertex 2's on Apple's software RAID0.

Is there any downside to this?

Yes I know many random reads and writes are bad for it in some way I'm not totally clear about, but I don't care that much, it's 2 drives, not the holy grail and I imagine I'll toss 'em in the trash within 2 years or so and get the next latest/greatest thing.

What I'd really like is a massive speed increase in spotlight, I have many many small files and using spotlight right now is pretty slow.

Is there any downside to booting a Mac Pro with Snow Leopard using dual SSDs set up on a RAID0? Will it work or does it break something random and would I be better off using one for boot and the second one for user data? I'd prefer not to do this, because my understanding is that dual Vertex drives on RAID0 are going to give me in the neighborhood of 500K reads and writes. Do many small files (like 800K pieces of email, all of which are quite short) conflict with this theory?

Thank you in advance to anyone who can share their insights or observations.

 

[cutterman]

There are literally 100's of posts on this very subject here. I think you would find it quite informative if you spent some time reading them.

Bottom line is that many are using RAID 0 for OS/boot drives and are quite happy with that configuration. Major issue is data loss from single drive failure.

 

[neckarb]

I have a 2009 Mac Pro with a 4-drive WD RE4 RAID0 that I'm pretty happy with for data like iTunes, movies, etc. I would like to remove my optical and use the two drive bays to run a boot AND user data disk, with dual 3.5" OCZ Vertex 2's on Apple's software RAID0.

Is there any downside to this?

Yes I know many random reads and writes are bad for it in some way I'm not totally clear about, but I don't care that much, it's 2 drives, not the holy grail and I imagine I'll toss 'em in the trash within 2 years or so and get the next latest/greatest thing.

What I'd really like is a massive speed increase in spotlight, I have many many small files and using spotlight right now is pretty slow.

Is there any downside to booting a Mac Pro with Snow Leopard using dual SSDs set up on a RAID0? Will it work or does it break something random and would I be better off using one for boot and the second one for user data? I'd prefer not to do this, because my understanding is that dual Vertex drives on RAID0 are going to give me in the neighborhood of 500K reads and writes. Do many small files (like 800K pieces of email, all of which are quite short) conflict with this theory?

Thank you in advance to anyone who can share their insights or observations.

Yeah I've got two Vertex 2's 2.5" RAID 0 for my boot drives, no problems here

 

[Transporteur]

You can do that but keep two things in mind;

- An OS drive won't really benefit from two striped SSD's. There is hardly a difference.
- The internal SATA ports of the Mac Pro have a combined throughput limit of about 660MB/s. Your 4 drive RAID0 should be good for about 400MB/s sequential reads/writes, a striped array out of 2 SSD's alone make about 520MB/s, so if you access both the mechanical drive array and the SSD array at the same time (sequential speeds) you'll be throttled by the controller.

Keeping this in mind, I'd suggest getting a single (bigger if you need the capacity) SSD for OS/apps and stay with the mechanical RAID0.
That would fit in the throughput limit of 660MB/s (400 for RAID, 260 for SSD).

BTW: Current SSD's will last WAY longer than 2 years. You can't possibly write that much data to an OS drive that it will wear off after two years.

 

[Honumaui]

ditto Transporteur raid 0 on boot is lost

raid 1 can be advantage if you have a failure you dont go down and can keep working till you get a fix

 

[the loose screw]

Mac Pro sled screws mismatch for 3.5" Vertex 2 SSD

I have a 2009 Mac Pro with a 4-drive WD RE4 RAID0 that I'm pretty happy with for data like iTunes, movies, etc. I would like to remove my optical and use the two drive bays to run a boot AND user data disk, with dual 3.5" OCZ Vertex 2's on Apple's software RAID0.

Is there any downside to this?

Yes I know many random reads and writes are bad for it in some way I'm not totally clear about, but I don't care that much, it's 2 drives, not the holy grail and I imagine I'll toss 'em in the trash within 2 years or so and get the next latest/greatest thing.

What I'd really like is a massive speed increase in spotlight, I have many many small files and using spotlight right now is pretty slow.

Is there any downside to booting a Mac Pro with Snow Leopard using dual SSDs set up on a RAID0? Will it work or does it break something random and would I be better off using one for boot and the second one for user data? I'd prefer not to do this, because my understanding is that dual Vertex drives on RAID0 are going to give me in the neighborhood of 500K reads and writes. Do many small files (like 800K pieces of email, all of which are quite short) conflict with this theory?

Thank you in advance to anyone who can share their insights or observations.

Need for speed, did you have any issues installing the 3.5" Vertex 2's into the Mac Pro's sled? Im installing a few myself and the sled screws dont seem to want to go any further than halfway into the Vertex 2's screw slots.

Can you advise?