Early MBP 2011, raid or not to raid

[Archduk3]

Hi.

I have searched for the answer to this question and have not really gotten a driect answer.

I have the 17" MBP from 2011, the one with Sata 3 in drive bay and Sata 2 in optical.

I want to upgrade and put in a faster drive, but should I go for 2 smaller SSD's and raid 0, or just one bigger drive in the SATA III

What will be the loss of mixing SATA II and III? And what would give the best speed?

I know stability issues when RAID-ing drives, but let's put that aside for now.

//C

 

[alphaod]

FYI: Striping (RAID 0) and mirroring (RAID 1); both RAID

Either way you'll want the same SSD [though I assume the former] (so both should be SATA II) or you'll just be wasting money since with any situation like this, the computer will wait for the slower drive. Hence you'll be limited by SATA II speeds.

As this is case, you might as well just buy a bigger SATA III SSD since it'll probably be just as fast two SATA II striped.

Whatever you choose, be sure to be backup often!

 

[wallysb01]

Hi.
What will be the loss of mixing SATA II and III? And what would give the best speed?
//C

I would suggest not RAID-ing at all unless you really do read and write large files frequently. And by large, I'm thinking in 10s to 100s of GBs for single jobs. Otherwise, just get a reasonable sized SATA III SSD for your needs, put in in the SATA III slot, and use that drive for boot/high-speed-scratch and get another drive in the optical bay for just bulk storage. If you really need >500GB of super fast drive capacity, go ahead with the RAID0 (plus a strong back up solution), but why are you doing this work on a laptop anyway? At that point you should have a workstation, if not buy time on a cluster.

 

[thekev]

I would suggest not RAID-ing at all unless you really do read and write large files frequently. And by large, I'm thinking in 10s to 100s of GBs for single jobs.

I would add that whether the data is compressed makes a difference. If it is, it's still possible to be cpu bound on massive files. Of course it depends on the software and file format.

 

[Archduk3]

I would suggest not RAID-ing at all unless you really do read and write large files frequently. And by large, I'm thinking in 10s to 100s of GBs for single jobs. Otherwise, just get a reasonable sized SATA III SSD for your needs, put in in the SATA III slot, and use that drive for boot/high-speed-scratch and get another drive in the optical bay for just bulk storage. If you really need >500GB of super fast drive capacity, go ahead with the RAID0 (plus a strong back up solution), but why are you doing this work on a laptop anyway? At that point you should have a workstation, if not buy time on a cluster.

I will be working a lot with moving images from 1080p to 2.5 k material. And problem is I am not really able to afford a complete new workstation at this time. Sure in september I will, but right now I am trying to figure out the best way below 550 Euro to speed up my workflow.

So basically, there will be a little speed improvement with two SATA II drives rather than one SATA III then?

And as for failing.

I heard it it double the risk of failing. True. But I have never had a drive fail. A USB one I never started up for 4 years, true. But an internal, never. So isn't all this talk just a lot of bull?

FYI: Striping (RAID 0) and mirroring (RAID 1); both RAID

If you do read the first post again, I wrote "raid 0"

//C

 

[wallysb01]

I will be working a lot with moving images from 1080p to 2.5 k material. And problem is I am not really able to afford a complete new workstation at this time. Sure in september I will, but right now I am trying to figure out the best way below 550 Euro to speed up my workflow.

So basically, there will be a little speed improvement with two SATA II drives rather than one SATA III then?

If you're upgrading to a workstation in the forseeable furture, I wouldn't put too much effort into this at the moment. So, with a 550 Euro budget, maybe just get a 500GB SSD, put it in the SATA III space, and move the hard drive to the ODD slot. That will make cloning/migrating things easy and from the sound of it, it will give you all you can reasonably extract out of your computer.

I'm not a huge video guy, but as thekev mentioned, all those video files, which are often compressed, may actually just peg your CPU before your SATA III port becomes the bottle neck.