software RAID Stripe in OS X

[micheleb]

I am considering putting a RAID Stripe (two Raptor 74gb SATA I) on my Mac Pro to be used as scratch disk for photoshop cs3. Since I don't have a RAID Card but OS X include a software support do you think it is worth? Or performance gain will be negligible?

 

[saltyzoo]

Depending on your exact circumstances you may have a performance loss using software RAID. I wouldn't waste the time setting it up expecting a performance gain personally.

 

[micheleb]

Depending on your exact circumstances you may have a performance loss using software RAID. I wouldn't waste the time setting it up expecting a performance gain personally.

that's what I thought but wasn't sure. so why setup a software raid instead? what are the circumstances it can turn to be useful?

 

[eluk]

that's what I thought but wasn't sure. so why setup a software raid instead? what are the circumstances it can turn to be useful?

Mirroring offers some degree of security.

 

[sirris101]

Depending on your exact circumstances you may have a performance loss using software RAID. I wouldn't waste the time setting it up expecting a performance gain personally.

What are you talking about? I am seeing almost 2x speeds from my Barracudas in software RAID 0.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/420493/

Software RAID 0 makes perfect sense on an 4 or 8 core machine where there is plenty of CPU power to handle the little bit of processing overhead.

I wouldn't be surprised if software RAID on an 8 core mac pro is faster than hardware RAID. Why? Because the processor on the RAID card is nowhere near as fast as as the Intel processors. Secondly, your data has to go through an additional bus via hardware RAID (however, RAID cards are designed to do this as quickly as possible).

You will see a performance boost in software RAID 0. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise. Just don't forget about the inherent risks of running RAID 0. But if you want slightly better performance, go for it.