Put a RAID 0 in your MacBook, PowerBook, or MacBook Pro
Posted by Helper Monkey
If that 60GB-200GB drive that came with your Mac laptop just isn’t cutting it these days, and you’re not put off by the thought of never listening to a CD or watching/burning a DVD again without an external hookup, then MCE has the solution for you. Their OptiBay Hard Drive kit adds a second hard drive to your MacBook, MacBook Pro, and yes, even your old PowerBook, by replacing the SuperDrive with up to a 160GB of extra storage space.
Eric Cheng has posted an interesting article detailing his experience in outfitting his MacBook Pro with a RAID 0 setup using two 320GB 5400 rpm drives. XBench results show a fair increase in many tasks, although a decrease in some small-block reads, and of course a hit in battery life as well. Other caveats include his keyboard no longer fitting quite right and an increase in noise coming from the second drive, but all-in-all Eric seems happy with the experience, and says the systems seems more “snappy”.
There a many reasons one might wish to add a second hard drive to a laptop. First and foremost would be to perhaps run the Mac OS on one drive, and Windows on the other (assuming you are using an Intel-based Mac laptop). Mobile video editors would also potentially benefit greatly from the increased storage. Of course, they’ll have to find a way to get all that beautiful footage OUT of their SuperDriveless machine when they’re done editing, but MCE has thought of that as well. Each of their hard drive kits comes with a portable enclosure for your old SuperDrive or Combo drive so you can hook it up to your system and load software and burn DVDs if necessary (special circumstances prevent this in the 15-inch MacBook Pro and MacBooks, but MCE offers comparable solutions).
April 29th, 2007 at 11:39 am
I thought you might find this interesting.
VIVA Mac!!!!!!
April 29th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
is possible to mount a RAID 0 with USB drive?
April 29th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
It’s two 160gb hard drive, 320gb total. There isn’t a 320gb laptop format hard drive yet.
April 29th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
I can see using this for more space - but you can always just get the new 200-250 GB drives out there.
RAID 0 has been debunked over and over again as a performance enhancer to basic desktop applications, which spindle speed matters a lot more. RAID 0 merely helps out with RAW transfer speed which really is only beneficial when you are working with large single files (A/V, photoshop). Also this is “software RAID”, so performance will not that great.
I don’t think it’s worth the “speed bump” given the increase risk of data lost and decreased battery life.
just my 2 cents
April 29th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
ONE day, one day… NAND
April 29th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
It should be noted that RAID 0 will increase your risk of data loss by 100% as it will be spanned across both drives. But, I guess that doesn’t bother some people.
April 29th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Sets you back a bit, but worthy alternative if your laptop *doesn’t need complete mobility*:
QBOX-P + Sil3112 chipset expresscard = raid0 and/or 1 combos with up to four sata hard drives running at full speed with only one esata external cable.
BYTECC expresscard i got for like 30 bucks off newegg and installed drivers from chipset manufacturer website to make work with osx. The qbox-p will set you back ~300 usd. Hopefully someone will design a competitor external case and lower that price but still worth it in my book.
approx $1300 for an additional 3.0 TB raid0
approx $500 for an additional 800 GB raid0
April 29th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Yes, it is possible to RAID across USB devices. One particularly strange person RAIDed USB floppy drives on a Mac!
May 1st, 2007 at 7:36 pm
With Carbon Copy Cloner, it should not be that bad. Weekly cloning would reduce the data loss.
Quote:
It should be noted that RAID 0 will increase your risk of data loss by 100% as it will be spanned across both drives. But, I guess that doesn’t bother some people.
May 28th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
The benefits of RAID 0 are small in comparison to the risk of loss data. It is not a matter of “if,” rather “when” you will have disk failure. I suggest a mirror to increase redundancy if your data is important (unless you own a $10k tape drive or $30k tape library).
December 28th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Is this RAID setup compatible with Timemachine in 10.5?
March 20th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Why would anyone want raid-0 in a laptop?
I like the setup, but Raid-1 is the way to go…
Your gonna lose all that data without redundant storage.