

How To: Apple MacBook Pro RAID 0 Array with 2 Intel X25-M SSDs - PStamatiou
http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-apple-macbook-pro-raid-0-array-with-2-intel-x25-m-ssds

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andrewtj
The article somewhat implies that running TRIM from Windows 7 on a dual-boot
(with OS X) system is useful - wouldn't that not be the case though since
Windows 7 is not going to know what blocks are in use on the HFS+ partitions?

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wmf
It's true that Windows can't trim HFS+, but the free space created by Windows
will make the SSD faster even when you boot back into OS X.

If you really really feel the need for speed in OS X, I recommend the host
protected area trick since it's a one-time optimization.

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andrewtj
Can you elaborate on what the "host protected area trick" is?

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wmf
<http://www.mail-archive.com/misc@openbsd.org/msg82811.html>

Setting the HPA (immediately after secure erase) ensures that some LBAs always
remain unallocated and should give the GC more candidate erase blocks to work
with, increasing random write performance. Or at least that's how I understand
it.

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pmjordan
However, there already is a certain amount of free space allocated for this
task. On the Intel drives, it's the difference between 80GiB and 80GB; the
latter is the maximum addressable by the OS, the former is the actual capacity
of the flash chips. Flash chips always have a power-of-2 capacity, and there
are 5, 10 or 20 chips in the various intel drives.

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timdorr
Why not RAID-1? RAID-0 on a technology that is known to die relatively faster
than HDD's seems risky. Plus, you should get a read speed boost from it too.

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apowell
Why RAID-anything in a laptop? A single Intel SSD is pretty darn fast, and the
second bay is more useful as a large-capacity spinning hard drive (unless you
need the optical drive, of course). I have my MBP set up this way and I've
been very pleased with it.

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PStamatiou
For me at least: the single SSD got boring after a while and I wanted to get
better speeds. As for storage I have a 2TB (RAID 0 as well) HTPC (
[http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-build-microsoft-
windows-7-in...](http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-build-microsoft-
windows-7-intel-core-i7-pc) ) that keeps most of my media and usenet junk,
then an external for other stuff.

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kogir
What's sad is that the chipset in the MacBook Pro he has can do hardware RAID,
Apple just doesn't support it in EFI.

It's Nvidia's MCP79 (of the nForce 790 SLI)

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yardie
Apple already has a RAID implementation. It's software based but the
performance is just as good as the hostRAID. It also has the benefit of being
swappable to any other Mac system unlike hostRAID which is chipset dependent.

