Bibin
Frequent Poster
So I got my hands on two identical Crucial 64GB M225 SSDs, which is basically a high-speed SATA-controlled NAND flash drive designed to replace a traditional spinning platter HDD.
Having two of them, I thought a RAID array would be pretty cool.
Now, my fairly new laptop, a 13" MacBook Pro, has two SATA ports - one for the HDD, one for the DVD drive. All I would need to do is fit the SSDs in the slots for the HDD and DVD drives. Problem! The DVD drive uses a proprietary miniaturized SATA power plug. A quick purchase from newmodeus.com got me an adapter that not only converted the plug but also allowed me to comfortably mount my drive inside a DVD drive-shaped bracket that installed very smoothly in the slot.
Now that I had them both hooked up, I'd have to reinstall the system.
I plugged in my firewire HDD full of software install images, and booted up the installer. About 10 minutes into installing, it claimed an unknown error and wouldn't install. Five tries later I was annoyed. This is before I even set up the RAID - I was just trying to install to one drive as-is.
Fast forward, I've installed OS X Snow Leopard to a traditional HDD, and made a time machine backup. I then installed the SSDs again, set them up to run in RAID 0 (striped), and restored from backup. A few minutes of fixing file permissions and everything was great!
Results time!
It boots in about 9 seconds. Great.
XBench reports phenomenal disk transfer rates:
Sequential uncached write: 310MB/s
Sequential uncached read: 398MB/s
Random uncached write: 303.2MB/s
Random uncached read: 256.3MB/s
Soon I'll be posting a video of me launching every single application on the computer at once. It'll be fun.
Having two of them, I thought a RAID array would be pretty cool.
Now, my fairly new laptop, a 13" MacBook Pro, has two SATA ports - one for the HDD, one for the DVD drive. All I would need to do is fit the SSDs in the slots for the HDD and DVD drives. Problem! The DVD drive uses a proprietary miniaturized SATA power plug. A quick purchase from newmodeus.com got me an adapter that not only converted the plug but also allowed me to comfortably mount my drive inside a DVD drive-shaped bracket that installed very smoothly in the slot.
Now that I had them both hooked up, I'd have to reinstall the system.
I plugged in my firewire HDD full of software install images, and booted up the installer. About 10 minutes into installing, it claimed an unknown error and wouldn't install. Five tries later I was annoyed. This is before I even set up the RAID - I was just trying to install to one drive as-is.
Fast forward, I've installed OS X Snow Leopard to a traditional HDD, and made a time machine backup. I then installed the SSDs again, set them up to run in RAID 0 (striped), and restored from backup. A few minutes of fixing file permissions and everything was great!
Results time!
It boots in about 9 seconds. Great.
XBench reports phenomenal disk transfer rates:
Sequential uncached write: 310MB/s
Sequential uncached read: 398MB/s
Random uncached write: 303.2MB/s
Random uncached read: 256.3MB/s
Soon I'll be posting a video of me launching every single application on the computer at once. It'll be fun.
