Moving to RAID 0

[IlliniNation]

I currently have a MacPro with a 750 main drive. I have two HD Bays open.. Can i Clone (with Carbon Copy Cloner) my 750 drive to the a RAID 0? If so I can then boot off it, etc....


Will this work?

 

[super_kev]

I don't see why it wouldn't work. You might want to look into RAID 1 (mirrored drives) if you want a real speed boost. The problem with RAID 0 is that if one of the drives fail, you loose all the data on both drives.

 

[MikeDTyke]

I don't see why it wouldn't work. You might want to look into RAID 1 (mirrored drives) if you want a real speed boost. The problem with RAID 0 is that if one of the drives fail, you loose all the data on both drives.

Ignore this, mirror`d drives do not give a speed boost. He is right that it`ll protect the data if you lose one.

I did this when i got my macpro. Here`s the steps.

Install the 2 new drives, doesn`t matter which bays but you might want to label them with a couple of stickers.
Run Disk Utility, Select create raid 0 (striped) partition and add your 2 new disks. Once the raid partition is completed, name it something appropriate.
Run CCC and select old drive as source and striped partition as destination.
Once done, open the system settings and select the strip partition as the drive to boot from.

Job done. enjoy

Cheers
M.

 

[Julien]

I use 2-750GBs as my main drive and 2-1TBs as my TM drive.

 

[UltraNEO*]

....if you want a real speed boost. The problem with RAID 0 is that if one of the drives fail, you loose all the data on both drives.

Curious...

For the speed boost, would we have the RAID 0 as the system drive or the Work/Scratch disk? I'm in the middle of setting up the drives as we speak.

Also.. What's the deal with the "RAID Block Size" option?? What happen if the blocks are set too small? Will it slow the drive down?? But make a more efficient uses of the drive space???

 

[super_kev]

Ignore this, mirror`d drives do not give a speed boost. He is right that it`ll protect the data if you lose one.

My mistake. I was under the impression that mirroring would make it faster since you'd have two copies with which to grab data from, but RAID 0 is indeed faster than RAID 1, which makes sense. 😱😉

 

[macenforcer]

I have raided 0 and 1 and to tell you the truth you won't notice the difference except in one respect. When I edit movies with eyetv the raid 0 setup does it twice as fast. Boot up will actually be slower believe it or not. Not by much but still slower with raid 0. Apple raid uses the cpu to raid the drives. If you want a real speed boost I suggest a raid card. Barefeats recommends some good ones.

 

[CaptainChunk]

I don't see why it wouldn't work. You might want to look into RAID 1 (mirrored drives) if you want a real speed boost. The problem with RAID 0 is that if one of the drives fail, you loose all the data on both drives.

FYI, RAID-1 has no performance advantage over a single drive. The cheapest way to make a mirrored array faster is to run a RAID 0+1 or 1+0, where you get much of the performance advantage of RAID-0. But this requires four drives. Even so, there's still a margin of failure here. If a one primary AND one mirror fails out of the four (far less likely, but it could happen), it's cie la vie.

I honestly only recommend plain RAID-0 for non-critical volumes, like scratch disks in FCP. Way too risky for sensitive data... I prefer single drive for boot, too. But everyone's got their preferences.

 

[disconap]

Agreed. Plus, from my experience of messing around with OSX software raids, I think there's more of a performance increase if you use it as scratch anyway (provided you're using apps that require scratch discs, like pro-audio or video, creative suite, etc.). Someone on here once posted a hack for having your system software write its scratch to a separate drive (i.e., the RAID), but I wasn't ballsy enough to try it out...