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blutus

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 30, 2012
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Hi Guys, please post your benchmark results and your experience using a raid0 setup with your MacBook Pro.

Here is an overview :):

Cruicial M4 2x256GB RAID0 Set:


crucialm4.png


Samsung 830 Series 2x256GB RAID0 Set:

830.png


NEW Samsung 830 Series 2x512GB RAID0 Set:

8301tb.png


Samsung 840 Series 2x250GB RAID0 Set:

840v.png


Samsung 840 pro Series 2x256GB RAID0 Set:

840pro2.png
 
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I'm using two Samsung SSD 830 Series 256GB (Raid0) without any problems in my 15" MacBook Pro (Mid2012). I tried to replace them with two Samsung SSD 840 Pro 256GB. The 840 Pro didn't work on the Superdrive-SATAIII Port. So, i moved back to the 830 series...
 

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I'm running two 256GB Crucial M4 SSD's. They were a bit cheaper than the Samsungs on sale, and they seemed to get better reviews in terms of reliability so that's why I went with them. Interestingly, they seem to read faster than your Samsung setup (I expected the opposite), but the write speed is much slower. Odd!

Though of course, 501MB/s is nothing to scoff at..

Fun fact, 927 MB/s is about 7.4Gb/s (bit vs byte), or roughly 1.4gb/s faster than a single SATA III connector is capable of. Therefore, this dual SSD RAID setup is faster than any single drive is capable of in a 2012 MacBook Pro.

It also looks like we're running a different version of the speed test, yours looks different! I downloaded my copy from the app store last week, dunno if that's the latest or not.

Does anyone know what the performance was stock? I should have benchmarked it then. However, this thing never booted up one time on the stock HD, I installed 16GB of RAM and both SSD's as soon as I took it out of the box, then booted into recovery and installed mountain lion.

This is on a 13" MBP, Mid 2012 Core i5, 16GB of Crucial RAM.
 

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By the way what is everyone doing as a backup solution? Obviously with RAID0 data loss is a concern. Right now I'm using time machine and I have the factory 500GB HDD in a USB 3.0 enclosure, but I ordered a Time Capsule (2TB) just so I don't have to remember to plug in my 500GB drive. (Plus I've been meaning to upgrade to an N router anyway...)
 
By the way what is everyone doing as a backup solution? Obviously with RAID0 data loss is a concern. Right now I'm using time machine and I have the factory 500GB HDD in a USB 3.0 enclosure, but I ordered a Time Capsule (2TB) just so I don't have to remember to plug in my 500GB drive. (Plus I've been meaning to upgrade to an N router anyway...)

I switched to using Carbon Copy Cloner for a backup solutions. Time Machine is too slow. CCC also makes the backup completely Bootable as well.

I have a Time Capsule and it's just painfully slow to perform a restore from it.
 
I switched to using Carbon Copy Cloner for a backup solutions. Time Machine is too slow. CCC also makes the backup completely Bootable as well.

I have a Time Capsule and it's just painfully slow to perform a restore from it.

Yeah, I honestly have no idea why time machine is so slow. With a USB 3.0 drive, it should take 30 minutes to backup an amount of data I can transfer to the drive in under one minute.

Does CCC work with a Time Capsule? I like the idea of not needing to remember to plug storage in, even if I take a hit on speed.

Time Capsule ought to be a thunderbolt device. Then, regular wi-fi backups can happen throughout (though they should be faster), but on that first large backup, or in the event a restore is needed, it could simply be plugged into the thunderbolt port to perform those rare often one-time tasks. Even in my case where the Time Capsule is in the other side of my office, I could easily plug my MacBook into it, or on desktop machines like the iMac, it's really not that difficult to move the time capsule once!

Do you know of any software that will keep a backed up copy of a folder to an external drive? Here's the scenario, I'm a hobby photographer (wife does it professionally), and sometimes I go out and shoot and like to download images to my MacBook to look through and do some basic cropping (major edits are done back at home on the 27" Cinema Display which is calibrated). I don't like having just one copy of my images, so I usually download them to my laptop and then to an external drive as a backup. I would love an application that would just automatically know to backup my 'pictures' folder as long as an external drive is connected. Are you aware of such an animal?
 
Yeah, I honestly have no idea why time machine is so slow. With a USB 3.0 drive, it should take 30 minutes to backup an amount of data I can transfer to the drive in under one minute.

Does CCC work with a Time Capsule? I like the idea of not needing to remember to plug storage in, even if I take a hit on speed.

Time Capsule ought to be a thunderbolt device. Then, regular wi-fi backups can happen throughout (though they should be faster), but on that first large backup, or in the event a restore is needed, it could simply be plugged into the thunderbolt port to perform those rare often one-time tasks. Even in my case where the Time Capsule is in the other side of my office, I could easily plug my MacBook into it, or on desktop machines like the iMac, it's really not that difficult to move the time capsule once!

Do you know of any software that will keep a backed up copy of a folder to an external drive? Here's the scenario, I'm a hobby photographer (wife does it professionally), and sometimes I go out and shoot and like to download images to my MacBook to look through and do some basic cropping (major edits are done back at home on the 27" Cinema Display which is calibrated). I don't like having just one copy of my images, so I usually download them to my laptop and then to an external drive as a backup. I would love an application that would just automatically know to backup my 'pictures' folder as long as an external drive is connected. Are you aware of such an animal?

I haven't tried using CCC with my Time Capsule. I have a portable USB 3.0 Drive I back up to. I have it set to start backing up as soon as it sees the drive mounted and once completed it un-mounts the drive. If I don't back up in 5 days it reminds me to do so.
 
I'm running two 256GB Crucial M4 SSD's. They were a bit cheaper than the Samsungs on sale, and they seemed to get better reviews in terms of reliability so that's why I went with them. Interestingly, they seem to read faster than your Samsung setup (I expected the opposite), but the write speed is much slower. Odd!

Though of course, 501MB/s is nothing to scoff at..

Fun fact, 927 MB/s is about 7.4Gb/s (bit vs byte), or roughly 1.4gb/s faster than a single SATA III connector is capable of. Therefore, this dual SSD RAID setup is faster than any single drive is capable of in a 2012 MacBook Pro.

It also looks like we're running a different version of the speed test, yours looks different! I downloaded my copy from the app store last week, dunno if that's the latest or not.

Does anyone know what the performance was stock? I should have benchmarked it then. However, this thing never booted up one time on the stock HD, I installed 16GB of RAM and both SSD's as soon as I took it out of the box, then booted into recovery and installed mountain lion.

This is on a 13" MBP, Mid 2012 Core i5, 16GB of Crucial RAM.

WOW, the read speed is awesome. My read speed is behind my expectations. What is your RAID block size? (my is 32k) Now, i have installed the new version of the disk speed test. The results are the same. :)
 
WOW, the read speed is awesome. My read speed is behind my expectations. What is your RAID block size? (my is 32k) Now, i have installed the new version of the disk speed test. The results are the same. :)

I'm using 32k block sizes as well. Larger block sizes are good for moving large files, but I think 32k is a better solution for the majority of tasks getting the best performance. Black magic speed test will be faster with a higher block size, though.
 
Okay here's one for ya..


I have 16 gigs of RAM in my machine, and I used tmpdisk to create an 8GB RAM disk. I believe it's actually faster than this, black magic was being really erratic. I was able to duplicate a 3.2GB file within the RAM disk virtually instantly (under a second)
 

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Does CCC work with a Time Capsule? I like the idea of not needing to remember to plug storage in, even if I take a hit on speed.

It won't be bootable off a network location. CCC can, however, backup to a disk image on a network drive. In case of drive failure, you could boot using the Internet Recovery mode and restore the image using Disk Utility.
 
It won't be bootable off a network location. CCC can, however, backup to a disk image on a network drive. In case of drive failure, you could boot using the Internet Recovery mode and restore the image using Disk Utility.

Makes sense, although I haven't found time machine to be slow. I formatted the time capsule, verified, and disabled spotlight indexing for the drive. Backups happen at about the same rate I can transfer files to the drive. They are very fast over GbE. I haven't tested restoring from a backup though, but hopefully I won't need to deal with that!

I still wish the Time Capsule had some sort of USB 3.0 or (dare I say) thunderbolt 'target' mode, where it could turn into an external attached storage device (not a slower network drive), for use when restoring from a backup, or the initial backup, etc.
 
Okay here's one for ya..


I have 16 gigs of RAM in my machine, and I used tmpdisk to create an 8GB RAM disk. I believe it's actually faster than this, black magic was being really erratic. I was able to duplicate a 3.2GB file within the RAM disk virtually instantly (under a second)

I am not familiar with RAM disk at all, but I was wondering if it would be possible to load the OS on the RAM disk for lightning fast speeds?
 
I am not familiar with RAM disk at all, but I was wondering if it would be possible to load the OS on the RAM disk for lightning fast speeds?

No it's not. RAM disks are kind of a thing of days gone by. Mac OS used to have it as a built in feature in some pre-OSX versions. Basically, you would put a ton of RAM in your machine and then create a RAM disk, then you would place your application and the files you wanted to manipulate in the RAM disk and it would be lightning fast. This was before SSD's, of course. And, because the hard drives were much less dense (for example I had a 9GB Hard Drive in my last OS 9 machine that was actually BIGGER than a standard 3.5" desktop hard drive), they were very very slow.

Not much use for them today, I just wanted to experiment with it. The RAM disks is deleted every time you turn your computer off, and must be re-created/re-mounted each time. Once RAM loses electricity, all of the data on it is lost. It's not like a Hard drive or a flash storage drive (like an SSD) which stores it's information even when it's switched off. That means the OS must first boot, create the RAM disk, and then load files into it.

There ARE some Linux distributions that are designed to be very small (the entire OS being only a couple hundred megs, or less). They run as a bootable LiveCD. Basically, you pop the CD in, and it loads the files from the CD directly into the RAM. The entire OS runs completely in your RAM. Apart from the initial load time, it is INSANELY fast.

I like Macpup: http://macpup.org. It's based off of puppy linux, but has a more polished, almost OSX like interface. It's free, just download it and burn it to a CD or make a bootable thumb drive, fire it up and see what you think.

I don't know that there are a lot of practical purposes to it, but if you make a good sized thumb drive into a puppy linux bootable drive, you could install software on there and have a workable OS. Just remember, you want a pretty good amount of RAM. You can still run applications stored elsewhere, but only applications loaded with the OS into RAM will be that fast. In addition to the RAM taken up by the OS and applications, and all of the files, you of course need RAM to run the computer!

In theory, OSX COULD do this. BUT, A) It would need to be written with a 'bootloader' of sorts that would load all of the files into RAM. and B) You would need a TON of RAM.

There aren't a lot of honest uses for this, although in the enterprise world entire clusters of servers with tremendous amounts of RAM that run their operating systems and all of their files inside the RAM do exist. Situations where insane performance is necessary. But it's not cost effective. Fun to play with though!

But anyway, a RAM disk, is loaded inside the operating system. So no, an OS cannot be installed on a RAM disk. However, there are OS'es that run inside RAM completely! (Meaning they do not store their files in the hard drive, but rather in the RAM, like MacPup!)

I may fire up MacPup and take a video or something, it's kind of fun to play with! More of a tinker toy, but still tool! (With time, patience, and the right knowledge it can be a very powerful OS, but with specific uses in mind. There are better linux distros for the 'everyman', but those don't run entirely in RAM!)

Edit: As it turns out, MacPup doesn't work (out of the box at least) with the MacBook. Some have gotten it to work but none of them (that I've found) mind sharing with the rest of us how they did it.
 
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This thread is the only reason why I wanted a cMBP instead of rMBP.

Am feeling a tad regretful now.
 
This thread is the only reason why I wanted a cMBP instead of rMBP.

Am feeling a tad regretful now.

Why is that? I'm happy with my decision!

The rMBP doesn't have any performance advantages REALLY (perhaps in a synthetic benchmark scenario), compared to a Raid 0 SSD cMBP. The Retina display IS awesome, though.

Perhaps take the money you saved and get yourself a high resolution IPS display? There are korean made ones on eBay under $500, or you could go with the gorgeous Apple Thunderbolt / Cinema display! (Yes, Apple makes both. Every once in a while I see a reference to the Cinema display not being available, that's not true. The Mac Pro doesn't have thunderbolt, Mac Pro users will still be using Cinema Displays)

By the way, RAID 0 doesn't HAVE to be done with SSD's. You can get near SSD performance with two fairly fast standard hard drives in RAID 0. Imagine a pair of 1TB drives in RAID 0, you'll have speed, AND 2TB of storage space, AND you'll have saved even MORE money to put towards that beautiful external display! (If you haven't done it yet, just food for thought).

That's what I ended up doing. I was torn, and hemm hawwed, but ultimately I decided I wanted the upgradability. Dual SSD's and 16 gigs of RAM, and MUCH cheaper than buying the upgraded stuff from apple on the rMBP. I definitely wanted 500 gigs of storage no matter what. So my options there were a cMBP ($1200) and a pair of Crucial SSD's ($400), for a grand total of $1600 (Well, plus $80 for the RAM). OR a $2500 configured rMBP (whether Apple or OWC, either choice of rMBP SSD is substantially more expensive than standard 2.5" SSD's) Going with the classic got me the same performance level (only with a bit more RAM) for $900 less. Spent that on an Apple Cinema Display. End result? I spent the same amount of money, but got more RAM, upgradeable performance, AND, have about the same resolution on a big 27" display instead of the smaller 13" display, which is more practical for me. Of course, get a cheap display or nix it altogether and you come out ahead!

That was the big prohibitor for me. 128GB of base storage isn't enough, and Apples SSD's for the rMBP are VERY expensive. OWC is a LITTLE cheaper at over $600 for 480GB, but still VERY expensive!
 
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Because I ordered the retina in the end ;)
still waiting for it though.

It would cost me roughly the same, so I went with the screen/portability vs expandability. Perhaps I shouldn't have gone with that and just go with 2xSSD goodness. This is really the only single reason why I have second thoughts about my purchase, the dual Raid0 setup just looks insane.

On the other hand, I could regret not buying a Mac Pro and doing a 4X raid0 setup.

Oh well.
 
Because I ordered the retina in the end ;)
still waiting for it though.

It would cost me roughly the same, so I went with the screen/portability vs expandability. Perhaps I shouldn't have gone with that and just go with 2xSSD goodness. This is really the only single reason why I have second thoughts about my purchase, the dual Raid0 setup just looks insane.

On the other hand, I could regret not buying a Mac Pro and doing a 4X raid0 setup.

Oh well.

Eh, either decision is good. To be perfectly honest, real world, you're not going to notice much. You aren't going to sit at your rMBP and say, "Golly, I wish I had another SSD in a RAID here, this is just too gosh darn slow!"

The main advantage for me, was storage size. 500 gigs of solid state storage is cheaper on the cMBP than on the rMBP. I could go with either a single 512GB SSD or two 256GB SSD's, but 2x 256GB was actually a tad cheaper, and twice as fast, so I went with that. In raid0, storage is combined, so it becomes 512GB.

I love the retina displays! In a perfect world, I'd have the retina, 512GB SSD pre installed, AND my cinema display! But my wallet said no, but the compromise I made I think, fits my needs perfectly. Same as going with the 13" over the 15". I chose more portability over a bit more horsepower. I LOVE the 13" form factor, and I don't NEED the 15" horsepower, so it was a good compromise for me! Others might be different, guess that's why they make both huh?

If you change your mind you should be able to return it. If you bought it from Apple I think you have 14 days. But I also think you could drive yourself crazy trying to decide. Then you'll have a blazing fast 13" MBP and look at it's 1280x800 display and wish you had the retina! Either way, you gotta give something up, so just pick which one is more important to you!
 
Eh, either decision is good. To be perfectly honest, real world, you're not going to notice much. You aren't going to sit at your rMBP and say, "Golly, I wish I had another SSD in a RAID here, this is just too gosh darn slow!"

The main advantage for me, was storage size. 500 gigs of solid state storage is cheaper on the cMBP than on the rMBP. I could go with either a single 512GB SSD or two 256GB SSD's, but 2x 256GB was actually a tad cheaper, and twice as fast, so I went with that. In raid0, storage is combined, so it becomes 512GB.

I love the retina displays! In a perfect world, I'd have the retina, 512GB SSD pre installed, AND my cinema display! But my wallet said no, but the compromise I made I think, fits my needs perfectly. Same as going with the 13" over the 15". I chose more portability over a bit more horsepower. I LOVE the 13" form factor, and I don't NEED the 15" horsepower, so it was a good compromise for me! Others might be different, guess that's why they make both huh?

If you change your mind you should be able to return it. If you bought it from Apple I think you have 14 days. But I also think you could drive yourself crazy trying to decide. Then you'll have a blazing fast 13" MBP and look at it's 1280x800 display and wish you had the retina! Either way, you gotta give something up, so just pick which one is more important to you!
I was torn up between the two 15"-ers, so the price difference there is practically non-existent if you want same configuration. Which is why I went with the retina in the end. (That and an extra tB port)

Anyway, my current RAID0 benchmark is sad compared to this, around 135mb/s. :/ (2xscorpio black)
 
No it's not. RAM disks are kind of a thing of days gone by. Mac OS used to have it as a built in feature in some pre-OSX versions. Basically, you would put a ton of RAM in your machine and then create a RAM disk, then you would place your application and the files you wanted to manipulate in the RAM disk and it would be lightning fast. This was before SSD's, of course. And, because the hard drives were much less dense (for example I had a 9GB Hard Drive in my last OS 9 machine that was actually BIGGER than a standard 3.5" desktop hard drive), they were very very slow.

Not much use for them today, I just wanted to experiment with it. The RAM disks is deleted every time you turn your computer off, and must be re-created/re-mounted each time. Once RAM loses electricity, all of the data on it is lost. It's not like a Hard drive or a flash storage drive (like an SSD) which stores it's information even when it's switched off. That means the OS must first boot, create the RAM disk, and then load files into it.

There ARE some Linux distributions that are designed to be very small (the entire OS being only a couple hundred megs, or less). They run as a bootable LiveCD. Basically, you pop the CD in, and it loads the files from the CD directly into the RAM. The entire OS runs completely in your RAM. Apart from the initial load time, it is INSANELY fast.

I like Macpup: http://macpup.org. It's based off of puppy linux, but has a more polished, almost OSX like interface. It's free, just download it and burn it to a CD or make a bootable thumb drive, fire it up and see what you think.

I don't know that there are a lot of practical purposes to it, but if you make a good sized thumb drive into a puppy linux bootable drive, you could install software on there and have a workable OS. Just remember, you want a pretty good amount of RAM. You can still run applications stored elsewhere, but only applications loaded with the OS into RAM will be that fast. In addition to the RAM taken up by the OS and applications, and all of the files, you of course need RAM to run the computer!

In theory, OSX COULD do this. BUT, A) It would need to be written with a 'bootloader' of sorts that would load all of the files into RAM. and B) You would need a TON of RAM.

There aren't a lot of honest uses for this, although in the enterprise world entire clusters of servers with tremendous amounts of RAM that run their operating systems and all of their files inside the RAM do exist. Situations where insane performance is necessary. But it's not cost effective. Fun to play with though!

But anyway, a RAM disk, is loaded inside the operating system. So no, an OS cannot be installed on a RAM disk. However, there are OS'es that run inside RAM completely! (Meaning they do not store their files in the hard drive, but rather in the RAM, like MacPup!)

I may fire up MacPup and take a video or something, it's kind of fun to play with! More of a tinker toy, but still tool! (With time, patience, and the right knowledge it can be a very powerful OS, but with specific uses in mind. There are better linux distros for the 'everyman', but those don't run entirely in RAM!)

Edit: As it turns out, MacPup doesn't work (out of the box at least) with the MacBook. Some have gotten it to work but none of them (that I've found) mind sharing with the rest of us how they did it.

Thank you for the very detailed response and helping me understand what a RAM disk is. It seems like a pretty cool thing to do if you have lots of RAM.
 
Thank you for the very detailed response and helping me understand what a RAM disk is. It seems like a pretty cool thing to do if you have lots of RAM.

Yeah. With todays faster drives (and larger files) it's not as necessary/feasible. But there was a time when a 128MB RAM disk could run Adobe Illustrator or photoshop and have a few large vector images or high resolution pictures in it, and work very very quickly!
 
15" mbp (mid-2012)
16GB Ram
840s (non-pro) RAID 0
10.8.2
TRIM Off
 

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Hey all
Since I'm waiting for my SSD in the mail, and am planning on using it along with the stock 500GB HDD, can anyone tell me how bootcamp behaves in a RAID0 configuration?
 
Okay here's one for ya..


I have 16 gigs of RAM in my machine, and I used tmpdisk to create an 8GB RAM disk. I believe it's actually faster than this, black magic was being really erratic. I was able to duplicate a 3.2GB file within the RAM disk virtually instantly (under a second)

lol

----------

I am not familiar with RAM disk at all, but I was wondering if it would be possible to load the OS on the RAM disk for lightning fast speeds?

it's a RAM disk, so the moment you turn off the computer you lose all the data. It was probably posted as a joke.
 
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