iMac 27 2011, 3 SSD's in raid0...

[LAHegarty]

Has anyone tried 3 SSD's in raid0 on there iMac 2011?

I'm planning to do raid0 with 2x SSD's using the spear SATA port on the back but was wondering if there would be any benefit to having 3 SSD's and using the SuperDrives SATA port for a 3rd SSD to boost speeds even higher, someone must have tried this.

Comense discussion.

 

[RyanXM]

I would think the two would be plenty of bandwidth. You are looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 900MB/s - 1GB/s.

 

[danielwsmithee]

Has anyone tried 3 SSD's in raid0 on there iMac 2011?

I'm planning to do raid0 with 2x SSD's using the spear SATA port on the back but was wondering if there would be any benefit to having 3 SSD's and using the SuperDrives SATA port for a 3rd SSD to boost speeds even higher, someone must have tried this.

Comense discussion.

You don't want really want to do this. On the 2011 iMac it does have 3 SATA ports but one (optical) runs at SATA 2.0 speeds 3Gb/s while the other two run at SATA 3.0 speeds 6Gb/s.

https://blog.macsales.com/10050-firmware-update-enables-6gbs-in-2011-imacs

If you raid all 3 together, the system will constantly be waiting on the slowest component in the raid0 set the optical drive bay. So you really won't see any performance improvement from going from 2 drives in raid0 to 3 drives in raid0 but you will see increased risk that is inherent with each drive you add to the raid array.

I'd stick with two SSDs in raid0 in the primary drive bay. Then use a single standalone in the optical drive bay for either data or backups.

 

[LAHegarty]

I'll leave it then, 2x 6Gb/s will be great, though, I am still curious to see what'll happen.

 

[danielwsmithee]

I'll leave it then, 2x 6Gb/s will be great, though, I am still curious to see what'll happen.

3x300MB/s < 2x600MB/s