I saw last week the first reviews of LaCie's d2 thunderbolt 2 drive enclosure and "SSD upgrade" module, which contains a 128GB Samsung XP941 PCIe SSD, and it got me thinking...
It might be possible to reach the theoretical max IO performance of the current generation of iMac by creating a RAID0 stripe across the internal PCIe SSD and a thunderbolt attached PCIe SSD. Has anyone tried this?
Consider the following configuration:
Then do something like the following procedure:
AFAICT, this configuration would get you a lot of nice things: something approaching the very fastest system/work volume it is possible to achieve on an iMac; an internal drive for bulk/nearline storage, and a TimeMachine volume to backup everything.
It's interesting enough that I'd consider dropping the $600 for a d2 + SSD module, except I don't know if a raid stripe across internal and TB-attached devices are actually a working configuration. Has anyone tried something like this before?
It might be possible to reach the theoretical max IO performance of the current generation of iMac by creating a RAID0 stripe across the internal PCIe SSD and a thunderbolt attached PCIe SSD. Has anyone tried this?
Consider the following configuration:
- Late-2013 iMac with fusion drive (i.e. an internal 128GB PCIe SSD and 1 or 3TB magnetic HD)
- LaCie d2 TB2 enclosure with SSD upgrade (i.e. a 128GB PCIe SSD and a 3 - 6 TB magnetic HD)
Then do something like the following procedure:
- Boot from external drive.
- Split the internal fusion drive
- Create 100GB partitions on each 128GB SSD, leaving the rest unallocated (force extra overprovisioning for consistent performance.)
- Create appleRAID stripe across the two 100GB SSD partitions.
- Partition and format internal HD as desired
- Partition and format external HD as a single large volume for TimeMachine.
- Install OSX on 200GB dual-SSD stripe, and go to town.
AFAICT, this configuration would get you a lot of nice things: something approaching the very fastest system/work volume it is possible to achieve on an iMac; an internal drive for bulk/nearline storage, and a TimeMachine volume to backup everything.
It's interesting enough that I'd consider dropping the $600 for a d2 + SSD module, except I don't know if a raid stripe across internal and TB-attached devices are actually a working configuration. Has anyone tried something like this before?