Is it worth to use my ext. HD's in RAID 0 - and is it possible?

[Kolind]

I just received my MBP which I will be using for editing and graphics work. I have to LaCie external FW800 drives which I can daisy-chain together. Now my question is if it is possible to put the two drives in a RAID 0 configuration, and if I would actually gain much of an improvement in terms of performance?

I seem to remember reading somewhere that RAID 0 in reality is not that much faster, but you get twice the failure rate of not having them in a RAID. Any of you have any experience with this?

 

[jsw]

I assume you mean using OS X's software RAID. I use it to RAID 1 some drives for backups (slow but safe), but I'm not sure of the speed improvement you'd see unless you went with a hardware RAID. Also, it all comes down to how fast your drives are. If they're a lot slower than your FW 800 bandwidth, you might see some improvement. If they're pretty fast, you might not see any. I'd agree that you'd double your risk of failure, and I'm sure your speed improvement wouldn't be vast, but it might be noticeable.

 

[Kolind]

I assume you mean using OS X's software RAID. I use it to RAID 1 some drives for backups (slow but safe), but I'm not sure of the speed improvement you'd see unless you went with a hardware RAID. Also, it all comes down to how fast your drives are. If they're a lot slower than your FW 800 bandwidth, you might see some improvement. If they're pretty fast, you might not see any. I'd agree that you'd double your risk of failure, and I'm sure your speed improvement wouldn't be vast, but it might be noticeable.

It would be OS X's software RAID, yes. The drives are 7200 rpm, 8MB buffer drives - so I would presume that they are as fast or faster than the FW800 bandwidth, which is why I'm presuming that I wouldn't gain much performance improvement.

 

[jsw]

It would be OS X's software RAID, yes. The drives are 7200 rpm, 8MB buffer drives - so I would presume that they are as fast or faster than the FW800 bandwidth, which is why I'm presuming that I wouldn't gain much performance improvement.

You'd probably be better off not using it then. I think OS X's RAID 0 is best used for taking a bunch of smaller drives and turning them into a larger virtual one.