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MacBook booting from external hd question p

Macguypro

Macguypro

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 28, 2015
5
1
Hey guys, I have a 2015 15" rmbp on the way with a 512 gig hd. I have a question about booting the os from the lacie 4.0 tb hd.

http://www.filmtools.com/lacie-rugg...3-0-4tb.html?gclid=CP3kvKGCg8cCFQQHaQodVmkDmQ

How efficient would this be as far as hd speed is concerned? I do music production and would like the space for plug ins and sample libraries.

Would like opinions if this would be a good idea or not.

Thanks for the help!
 
The problem there is that device is really two, 2TB drives run in RAID 0 to appear as one, 4TB drive. OS X can't use RAID 0 as the boot drive as far as I know.

You could break the RAID and set that up as two 2TB drives, and then run the OS from one of the drives if you wanted. There would be some speed loss from doing that.
 
Why not use the SSD as the boot drive as it is exponentially faster, and store your libraries and plugins in the LaCie?
 
Macguypro said:
Hey guys, I have a 2015 15" rmbp on the way with a 512 gig hd. I have a question about booting the os from the lacie 4.0 tb hd.

http://www.filmtools.com/lacie-rugg...3-0-4tb.html?gclid=CP3kvKGCg8cCFQQHaQodVmkDmQ

How efficient would this be as far as hd speed is concerned? I do music production and would like the space for plug ins and sample libraries.

Would like opinions if this would be a good idea or not.

Thanks for the help!
Click to expand...
Your idea would be extremely slow compared to simply storing your libraries on your LaCie drive and keeping your (roughly 9x as fast) SSD as a boot drive.
 
Last edited:
Weaselboy said:
The problem there is that device is really two, 2TB drives run in RAID 0 to appear as one, 4TB drive. OS X can't use RAID 0 as the boot drive as far as I know.
Click to expand...

If it is a hardware RAID0 then there should be no issue installing the OS on the array and booting from it.
If it is a software RAID1 then there should be no issue installing the OS on array and booting from it.

For the last three versions of Mac OS X (10.8, 10.9, and 10.10) I have been running the operating system from two SSDs configured in a software RAID0 on my Mac Pro. External drives on a MacBook Pro should operate the same way.
 
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Weaselboy said:
Thanks for the clarification. I was thinking you could not use a RAID 0 as the boot drive.
Click to expand...

You can use it but raid 0 does have some known stability issues.

More importantly there is no good reason for the OP not to use the superfast internal drive as the boot drive and store his files and plugins etc on the external.
 
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Samuelsan2001 said:
You can use it but raid 0 does have some known stability issues.
Click to expand...

I have setup software RAID0 on a few Mac Pro computers and a few Mac Mini computers and have had no stability issues whatsoever. Do you have any links about these known stability issues? In my experience the software RAID0 on Mac OS X has been very stable of the several computers I have set it up on.

Samuelsan2001 said:
More importantly there is no good reason for the OP not to use the superfast internal drive as the boot drive and store his files and plugins etc on the external.
Click to expand...

Agreed
 
Thanks for the help everyone, I will be installing ableton on the main ssd, my bigger plugins like omnisphere and komplete will have their libraries on the external LaCie as well as my samples.

Thanks for helping me figure this out!
 
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