Mac Pro :: Striped SSDs Not Looking So Fly?
Sep 30, 2010
Recently I revamped my computer. I bought an Areca 1680 with 2GB of cache and 3 120GB Vertex 2 SSDs.
I have the 3 SSDs striped in RAID 0 on the RAID card and my old 4x 300GB VRs in RAID 5 on the same RAID card. The old drives in RAID 5 on the new card seems faster, probably due to the extra cache, but the SSDs are weirdly slow.
With Quickbench, I can't seem to push past 500MB/s for reads and 450MB/s for writes.
I'm pretty sure 2 drives can push those numbers. I know it's not a south bridge issue and the RAID card is in the second PCIe slot.
Could it be my stripe size? Right now I have it set at 64KB. Write back cache is enabled and TCQ is disabled.
(For reference my RAID 5 gets 205MB/s read and 370MB/s write for a 4GB file)
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Mar 18, 2009
I'm quite new to the OS (Level) Raid concept provided by the Disk Utility within Leopard OS X 10.5.6 and other OS X OS's, but I saw a great video showing 2 USB External HD's hooked up to a macbook running a raid to tie them together (striped or mirrored). This concept is simple! But heres my situation:I have an iMac 22" 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, Running off of a "298.1 GB WDC WD3200AAJS-40VWA0 Media Hard Drive". I also have an External Drive "465.8 GB WD 5000AAV External Media".
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Aug 5, 2010
Does anyone know if it's possible to have two sets of striped drives using a single hardware RAID controller? I'm looking at the ARC-1210 and it seems like you can have more than one set of striped drives, but I'm not positive. My plan is to have two small SSDs set up for the boot drive and two HDDs for storage, each pair set up with RAID 0. Can this be accomplished using a single controller? Note: I'd just use OS X's software RAID but I need to keep the cores freed up for computation. I'm not concerned with redundancy--just speed.
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Apr 15, 2012
My MacBook Pro3,1 (early 2007) produces a screen of narrow horizontal bands of black and white, with a few scraps of pale blue and a few fragments of letters, but ONLY when booting from the original install DVD. The displayed pattern has a narrow vertical line in mid-screen, with one side of the displayed pattern shifted up (or down) by the width of the horizontal bands. This display is unreadable, and therefore unusable.
Apple serviced the MBP's defective NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor in 12/2010. A year earlier they replaced the SuperDrive.
In May 2011 I replaced the Apple Memory with 4 GB of Kingston memory.
The MBP boots off of the hard drive into SL 10.6.8 with no problems.
In preparation for an upgrade to Lion, I booted off of the original Install DVD into the Apple Hardware Test, and ran one pass of the extended test. It took about two hours. No problems were found. Next, to use Disk Utility to check/repair the hard drive structure before the upgrade, I restarted while pressing the C key to boot from the Install DVD. The DVD was accessed, the grey Apple screen displayed, but at the end of the boot process the striped display appeared instead of the expected system installer display.
This Install DVD boot failure is repeatable.
I have rebooted with no problem from the hard drive.
I have rebooted off of this Install DVD, but into the Apple Hardware Test (D-key pressed), and rerun the short test.
I have reset PRAM and SMC, but the problem remains.
It is possible that the Install DVD was not used since the 12/2010 graphics processor repair, until now. Although I do not intend ever to use the Install DVD to roll back to MacOS 10.4.9, this is the tool I'm supposed to use to repair my system hard drive.
I'm baffled because this problem only appears when booting into the installer program. Is it possible that the repair of the graphics processor (or even the SuperDrive replacement) introduced an incompatibility between my MBP's hardware configuration and that expected by the Install DVD
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.4.9), Install DVD
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Aug 22, 2009
I have (2) Patriot Torqx 256GB SSD's in a striped RAID array powering my MBP. Where I have enjoyed the incredible performance, it really killed the battery life of this machine.I am in the process of "un-striping" them now and reinstalling OS. Any advice on best configure files to best utilize the new configuration? Should I keep boot files and documents on different drives?
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May 27, 2009
I want to install two X25-M SSD's in my second optical bay. I have already modified an old, empty drive case to mount both SSDs so I just need to know what cables I would need.
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Aug 20, 2009
I'm wondering if SSDs are compatible with the Mac Pro3,1 (08)?
And are all SSDs the same, or are some faster? and where should I get them, I'm googling atm.
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Feb 24, 2010
I have a quick noob query about SSDs vs. HDs in the MBP
Pretty much, what are the advantages of having a solid-state drive over a normal 5400 or 7200 rpm drive? Is it just speed vs. space?
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Apr 17, 2010
I mentioned to someone that I was thinking of buying the optional 128 or 256SSD on the MBP I intend to buy, and perhaps in a couple of years buying an SSD of greater capacity. (The 512 is beyond my budget at present.)
The person I spoke to didn't think this was a good idea because the 128 and even the 256 would soon fill up with photos, and that I would then want a larger drive.
(Backing up an external drive is of course highly recommended, but it's pretty neat to have all one's photo collection on the computer's own drive.)
Replacing an SSD with another, he said, was a "dickens of a job" as the existing (factory) SSD is built into the mother board.
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Jan 12, 2011
So I'm considering a new boot volume for my Mac Pro revolving around this RAID controller, since I have had great experience with 3ware's products in my Linux boxen and it really seems like $700 for the Mac raid controller is a bit much. My workflow revolves very heavily around virtualization. I've been thinking about a variety of options for SSDs and hybrid drives and even just fast laptop HDs. Am I crazy for considering 2.5" drives other than SSDs? I'm thinking of 2.5" drives because I put a pair of them in the lower optical bay without issue. The amount of storage needed on the boot volume is probably in the range of 150-200GB. Getting SSDs that size may not be in the budget. Thus, I am currently considering either a pair of 320GB WD Scorpio Blacks or a pair of 250GB Seagate Momentus XTs. I'm not sure the hybrid Momentus drives are worth it. Additionally, I know that a lot of SSDs don't fully support RAID in their firmware. Thus, I am reluctant to buy one, let alone a pair, since a lot of places don't seem to have terribly generous return conditions for SSDs. Is this a fool's errand? Should I just relegate my VMs to other storage and get a smaller SSD for the OS + apps?
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Aug 28, 2010
Difficulty deciding between 1 or 2. Unsure about real world performance gain of 2. No experience with SSDs or RAID 0. Worried about alignment and sleep/hibernate issues. Stock 5400rpm 320GB will go inside eSATA enclosure. Does anybody have a good eSATA ExpressCard/34 to recommend? I don't care about the SuperDrive. But I'll keep it for Care warranty purposes.
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Oct 22, 2010
Just found this when I was browsing through some stuff.That's the controller that can be found from Toshiba HG2 SSDs that are used in at least 2010 MBPs. Here's a pic of the MBA's SSD:Original pic by iFixit (full size)As you can see, both are using Toshiba's T6UG1XBG Solid State Drive controller
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Aug 19, 2010
I am checking out the market on SSDs for my Macbook Pro and I've found a few manufacturers differentiate their product lines as "regular" SSDs and Raid-Ready SSDs. The raid ready's being more expensive and having a little less space. I'm not as tech savvy as I should probably be, so I don't know what Raid or Raid-Ready means and what value it might have.
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Aug 4, 2009
As we discussed in other threads it could be particularly advantageous to use SSD RAID0 arrays for dual or even multiple booting. With a decent amount of striped SSDs the idea is to run all your operating systems and applications with high speed. At least that is the theory. To test the idea I have decided to use two Maxtor 160 GB HDD in a very basic dual RAID0 array configuration for booting OS X and Vista-64 in AHCI mode.
Here we go:
First thing I learned is that you have to partition the HDDs prior to building your array.
Second thing I learned is that you have to keep it all in HFS+ to make it work.
So now I have used disk utility to create two equal size partitions in HFS+ with GPT on both HDDs.
Next I fused the two lower partions together for a first RAID0 array named 2R-Leo. Format is still set to HFS+ and RAID0 mode is selected.
Then I fused the two upper partitions together for a second RAID0 array named 2R-Vista. Here format is also set to HFS+ and RAID0 mode is selected.
With that done I exited the disk utility to get a fresh start on it. I then entered disk utility again.
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Mar 30, 2010
I've been surfing the web for hours now to find the right SSD for me. I have an ExpressCard SSD which unfortunately is having too many problems so I am planning on buying the MCE OptiBay to replace the SuperDrive with a second hard drive.
So my intention is to buy a cheap/small SSD to install OS X on it and to keep the home folder on the internal drive. There seem to be two SSDs which fit into that category. I need some advice whether those two products even work on my MacBook Pro Early 2008 2,4GHz, or if there are any other incompatibilities & problems.So the two candidates are Intel X25-V 40GB or OCZ Vertex 30GB.
The OCZ offers less space and costs slightly more but neither of them are really significant as they are in my price range. The OCZ ("Read: Up to 230 MB/s & Write: Up to 135 MB/s") seems to be much faster then the Intel one ("Read: up to 170MB/s & Write: up to 35MB/s"). Especially the writing speed of the Intel X25-V is really poor, even when compared to normal HDDs.
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Aug 4, 2009
My current setup consists of my boot drive (250GB), a striped RAID (500GB) for storage and a 1TB Time Machine Drive.I have recently bought a new 1TB internal drive and would like to replace the striped raid with this drive, thus freeing up two 250GB drives - 1 which i will keep internally and the other will go into a external enclosure My question is can i just copy the files from the RAID to the new internal or do i have to use software to clone it?
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Apr 18, 2010
very new to SSDs here so need your confirmation -- are the updated second generation Intel SSDs officially called Postville ?
I ask because I'm finding this Intel SSD on Amazon Germany but it doesn't say "G2" anywhere. Just wanna make sure its the right thing.
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