SSD RAID 0 results

Eric Cheng of Echeng.com says he has successfully installed and run a RAID 0 SSD array in a MacBook Pro, with strong performance results. Utilizing two 120GB OCZ SATA SSD notebook hard drives, and an MCE OptiBay hard drive adapter (placed in the MacBook Pro's SuperDrive bay), Cheng was able to configure the two drives and set them up in a striped RAID 0 array, and install a bootable copy of Mac OS X.

The SSD array yielded almost three-to-one speed performance over the stock SATA hard drive, in small sequential reads at 1024KB transfer sizes, with similar ratios on larger reads. Large writes were consistently over twice as fast. Cheng says he initially planned to run the array as an experiment, expecting to drop the striped array eventually. After a few days use however, he decided that he would stay with the array due to its extreme speed performance and lack of any major issues.

Cheng reported minor delays (10-15 seconds) before reaching a Mac boot icon on cold booting, and occasionally, 5-10 second delays on waking from sleep. The OCZ 120GB SSD drives retail for $500 each, while the OptiBay drive sells for $120, making for a total upgrade cost of $1,120.

by MacNN Staff