RAID 0 on a spare 2012 MacBook Pro

[tabormeister]

Although possible, you're left with a 2012 that is 2/3 the speed of a stock 2013– early 2015 MBP.

It is less expensive to upgrade a later machine but that's not so hot as I found out when I replaced the AHCI in our 2013 — although GB tests recorded a 3x RW increase, the overall real world performance increase was barely noticeable. Even better, buy a 2017 or later if you have the real need for speed.

As for all of the RAID 0 comments on these, how many would notice a real world performance increase over simply replacing that terrible HDD with an SSD? For the record, I've replaced hundreds over the years. The initial R/W speed boost is great but nearly doubling it adds almost nothing in real world performance. There is no YouTube video that can change my mind having upgraded as many Macs as I have over the years.

One is entitled to their opinion that the money is well spent while destroying the one thing that makes these valuable in the secondary market (a working Superdrive) but I don't believe it. The original point I was making is still the most valid.

Well, I finally got bored enough to do Raid 0 on a spare 2012 Macbook Pro for fun - spoiler alert, it's great! Catalina runs just as well as it does on a single SSD, but at...you guessed it, roughly double the speed.

Fisking your points a bit here:

• Cost prohibitive - I spent a total of $4.54 on two Sata to M.2 adapters and $18 on two decent 128GB SATA M.2 SSDs. I borrowed an optical bay adapter from another machine, but those can be had for $6.99.
• Just buy a faster machine, it will be more cost effective - See above.
• Removing the Superdrive will damage resale value - unless you've got hammers for fingers, keep it and toss it back in when you sell.
• Nobody would notice a real world performance increase - I am a person and I noticed, but don't trust me, peep the....

Real-world data: (Tested on identical Catalina installs w/ identical programs installed on the same machine)

• 4 seconds shaved off cold boot to Safari opened, single SSD ~36secs over 3 runs, RAID 0 ~32secs over 3 runs
• Sequential *AND* random Write/read speed increased dramatically, ~460 read up to ~960 read, ~140 write up to ~250 write (remember, these are $9 SSDs...a reputable brand or larger SSDs would make these numbers happier). I did not benchmark random I/O because I wanted to do practical real-world tests for that.
• Subjectively, operating system is MUCH snappier. With one SSD, random slowdowns and pauses were frequent (when installing software and browsing in Safari at the same time for instance) they don't happen with the array.
• Opening programs was roughly twice as fast (tested w/ a battery of the App Store, Safari, Photos, Word, Powerpoint, Excel.) launched in ~6secs over many runs on 1 SSD, and ~3 seconds w/ RAID.
• Installing Office was minutes faster
• Copying files was much faster

While this was fun, I'll probably return this machine to a larger SSD running modern MacOS thanks to OCLP, or who knows - maybe I'll upgrade it to NVMe for about the same cost as this fun little experiment. Hopefully this puts the issue to bed for anyone curious -

Yes, RAID 0 SSDs on a MacBook Pro works and is noticeably faster.

 

[oldmacs]

Excuse my complete ignorance, but is there a benefit to doing this with M.2 SSDs versus standard SATA SSDs?

 

[tabormeister]

Excuse my complete ignorance, but is there a benefit to doing this with M.2 SSDs versus standard SATA SSDs?

No, they're just generally cheaper and more plentiful. You'd get even better results with two *good* SSDs.

For this test, I wanted to use the cheapest stuff possible to demonstrate you still get a serious performance uplift even with worst case scenario hardware. I'm going to throw a single 850 Evo back in it now, but it even surprised me how well this worked. Catalina being the latest OS that'll run on it is the main limitation. I referred to this stackexchange answer for a couple of the hitches involved in making Catalina play nice with RAID 0, but you can just use a vanilla Catalina installer on machines that support it, no root patching or finagling necessary.

 

[0682687]

Well, I finally got bored enough to do Raid 0 on a spare 2012 Macbook Pro for fun - spoiler alert, it's great! Catalina runs just as well as it does on a single SSD, but at...you guessed it, roughly double the speed.

Fisking your points a bit here:

• Cost prohibitive - I spent a total of $4.54 on two Sata to M.2 adapters...

Yes, RAID 0 SSDs on a MacBook Pro works and is noticeably faster.

...but you're wrong.

You're supposed to use the iboff adapter, in conjunction with this little gem. Put your m.2s as the raid 4 array and your nvme as the parity, thus solving the bottleneck.

also, is there a sata > 4*m.2nvme adapter or can someone make one for me? This would be awesome for a Raid 60, or even the elusive raid 70

 

[oldmacs]

No, they're just generally cheaper and more plentiful. You'd get even better results with two *good* SSDs.

For this test, I wanted to use the cheapest stuff possible to demonstrate you still get a serious performance uplift even with worst case scenario hardware. I'm going to throw a single 850 Evo back in it now, but it even surprised me how well this worked. Catalina being the latest OS that'll run on it is the main limitation. I referred to this stackexchange answer for a couple of the hitches involved in making Catalina play nice with RAID 0, but you can just use a vanilla Catalina installer on machines that support it, no root patching or finagling necessary.

I've got Sequoia on my Mid 2012 13" Pro, courtesy of OCLP - might be worth a try?

 

[tabormeister]

...but you're wrong.

You're supposed to use the iboff adapter, in conjunction with this little gem. Put your m.2s as the raid 4 array and your nvme as the parity, thus solving the bottleneck.

also, is there a sata > 4*m.2nvme adapter or can someone make one for me? This would be awesome for a Raid 60, or even the elusive raid 70

Honestly why stop there?! Use the nevbolt to slap one of these guys directly onto the pcie bus!! Honey badger don't care. Then bifurcate the pcie bus and slap a 100gbe mellanox card in it so I can connect it to my SAN!

I've got Sequoia on my Mid 2012 13" Pro, courtesy of OCLP - might be worth a try?

That's what I'm running now installed last night. Bit poky on this old machine but totally usable. Need to backup a bunch of images off icloud and keep the metadata because downloading from icloud.com removes date taken 0.o