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SSD or Softraid
- Thread starter vddrnnr
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This depends on the rest of the hardware, your capacity requirements and what you already have on hand. I managed to configure a bootable (Mac OS X 10.4.11) striped software RAID with 2x WD 7200rpm 160GB SATA II drives stepped down with IDE adapters for the ATA/66 bus in a Sawtooth G4. The Sawtooth's IDE volume capacity of 128GB was multiplied for a total of 256GB in a single volume. It worked well enough and was very cheap to experiment with. Throughput speeds maxed out the bus (~55-60MB/sec). Boot times were faster than a single drive, but drive spin-up is always going to be something that is noticeable after the machine idles for a bit (you can of course turn this option off).
After fitting out my G4 portables with mSATA SSDs and seeing those max out their ATA/100 buses, I would definitely recommend the SSD option over any spinning drive(s). It's silent and very zippy. My DC G5 tower loved booting from a 256GB mSATA SSD, but the 1st gen SATA bus still puts a <150MB/sec cap on transfer speeds.
Simply put; If you have the HDDs on hand and the machine can cater for the physical space required (like a tower), try it out and see if you're happy with it. Otherwise a small-ish SSD (64GB or so) is going to be the winner in terms of performance with near-zero seek times. SSD is the way to go if you can afford it.
After fitting out my G4 portables with mSATA SSDs and seeing those max out their ATA/100 buses, I would definitely recommend the SSD option over any spinning drive(s). It's silent and very zippy. My DC G5 tower loved booting from a 256GB mSATA SSD, but the 1st gen SATA bus still puts a <150MB/sec cap on transfer speeds.
Simply put; If you have the HDDs on hand and the machine can cater for the physical space required (like a tower), try it out and see if you're happy with it. Otherwise a small-ish SSD (64GB or so) is going to be the winner in terms of performance with near-zero seek times. SSD is the way to go if you can afford it.