Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
I don't have one in my Mac Pro, but I have a 120gb OCZ Vertex in my X61t Tablet laptop and its hella fast...especially compared to the 5400RPM drive I took out of it. :) Windows 7 64-bit boots in 20 or so seconds with it. It also conveniently uses half the wattage of the hard drive....
 
I will install a used pair of 3,0 GHz Quad Xeons very shortly in my MacPro1,1 and have that effectively upgraded to an octo 2007 MacPro1,1. Now I'm thinking about my next project with the MacPro and I thought I have a go at putting in a pair of fast 64 GB SSDs and run them as a soft RAID0 boot drive under 10.5.7 and Snow Leopard when it comes out. I feel that I will get away with 128 GB for boot drive.

For Bootcamp Vista64 I will have a separate HD that will run either from the internal SATA #3 or from ODD-SATA #5 with AHCI drivers depending of my finding when I have installed the RAID0.

I was thinking of two Super Talent SSD MasterDrive SX 64GB 2.5" SATA II with 2,5" to 3,5" mechanical adaptors. They would cost me about 300€ and would work on 220/200 MB/s read/write speeds. Spec follows:

http://www.supertalent.com/products/ssd_detail.php?type=MasterDrive SX#

also see white paper on Mac Pro uses

http://www.supertalent.com/datasheets/SuperTalent Ultradrive Apple Whitepaper.pdf

Before I get carried away with this I thought I should ask some questions because I have zero experience with RAID0 on a Mac. All my experience is with a RAID0 on an old Shuttle PC with build in RAID controller. Questions:

1) Would I be able to use what Leopard offeres as a software RAID without incurring severe bottlenecks elsewhere? I thought that I'll have plenty of CPU power with the octo but what do I know?

2) Would my boot drive be several times faster than an un-RAIDed 5400rpm HD?

3) If I was forced to use a hardware RAID controller
- what would be a good choice?
- can I still use the internal SATA II ports?
- if not would it be feasible to change the cabling?
- what cable sets to use?

This is a longer term project so I might wait some weeks months if new product is about to be launched on the market.
 
Before I get carried away with this I thought I should ask some questions because I have zero experience with RAID0 on a Mac. All my experience is with a RAID0 on an old Shuttle PC with build in RAID controller. Questions:

1) Would I be able to use what Leopard offeres as a software RAID without incurring severe bottlenecks elsewhere? I thought that I'll have plenty of CPU power with the octo but what do I know?

2) Would my boot drive be several times faster than an un-RAIDed 5400rpm HD?

3) If I was forced to use a hardware RAID controller
- what would be a good choice?
- can I still use the internal SATA II ports?
- if not would it be feasible to change the cabling?
- what cable sets to use?

This is a longer term project so I might wait some weeks months if new product is about to be launched on the market.

1. No problem. RAID0 doesn't place much burden on the CPU.
2. Are you kidding me? Of course. :D
3. You won't be forced to. There's no advantage to using a RAID card for RAID0 arrays. RAID cards provide an advantage for processing parity calculations on more complex RAID5 and 6 arrays which provide redundancy.
 
From your sig it looks like you dual boot. AFAIK you cannot use software RAID in a dual boot setup.

He knows that you can actually. He's the one who taught me how to do it. :) But during your windows session you can't access the software raid. You can still boot from either though and from Mac OS you can assess the windows drive NP.
 
He knows that you can actually. He's the one who taught me how to do it. :) But during your windows session you can't access the software raid. You can still boot from either though and from Mac OS you can assess the windows drive NP.

Qua?! Dual boot from a OS X Software RAID partition, in my house?! Links are needed!! :eek::confused:

EDIT:

Sorry I assumed that he was going to use both SSD's in a software RAID partition that he would use for both OS X and Windows. I totally get that if you software RAID 2 disks and then have a 3rd for just Windows that you can have a dual boot system.
 
Sorry I assumed that he was going to use both SSD's in a software RAID partition that he would use for both OS X and Windows. I totally get that if you software RAID 2 disks and then have a 3rd for just Windows that you can have a dual boot system.

Yep, that's the ticket. :)
 
Yes, that was the plan. I do no performance jobs in Vista64. Just watching and (hopefully soon) ripping Blu-Ray and the odd non OS X programm.
 
Also I wonder why Bootcamp wants to make the Windoze HDD read-only? Surely the few useless files OS X might automatically place there won't hurt anything? There are a few little utilities that will allow read & write to it - I'll have to track them down again and see what happens.
 
Tess, I'm sure you remember that Vista runs on NTFS only. Bootcamp partitions in FAT32 which Vista then automatically turns into NTFS because Microsoft put a mandatory requirement into Vista. XP also does that when your Bootcamp partition is >32 GB. FAT32 is read/write from both OSes but has a file size limit of 4 GB (nasty sometimes). NTFS is read only from OS X. Paragon have a half decent NTFS driver which sells at 39$ if memory serves me right. There is also the NTFS/3G free driver but it is a bit difficult and also buggy.
 
I'm running the Paragon NTFS drivers and they are pretty good. They get occasionally glitchy with things in the recycle bin/trash can, but otherwise no complaints.
 
I'm running the Paragon NTFS drivers and they are pretty good. They get occasionally glitchy with things in the recycle bin/trash can, but otherwise no complaints.

I have a glitch in the selection of the boot drive. When Paragon NTFS is active I can see no Windows boot drive in the preselection window. It is annoying. Other than that it is ok. It even formats NTFS decently in disk utility.
 
Which do you mean? The control panel selectors or the the Option Key selection menu?

The Control Panel selection BC installs in Windows doesn't work for me at all. I haven't tried the one in OS X yet.
 
How about 24 250GB SSDs in your computer?

.
How about loading 53 programs in 18 seconds?
A 700MB DVD RIP in .8 seconds?
Downloading 2GBs in one second?

By the way, those 24 SSDs cost approximately 15,000 dollars.
Add to that the cost of RAID and big power supplies.

24 SSDs in one computer!
.
 
The Control Panel selection BC installs in Windows doesn't work for me at all. I haven't tried the one in OS X yet.

That is usually the result of an installation complication. I got it when I mismatched language versions. German OS X with US Vista Version. For you it could be Japanes and US mixing. Windows is fickle. You can sort it with vLite though.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.