Mike Benner: Scary Fast Raid, Coming to a MacBook Pro Near You

Scary Fast Raid, Coming to a MacBook Pro Near You

Dec 14 by Michael Benner

So, after some research, I have decided it is time to do the last possible performance upgrade to my MBP and just completely void the warranty. Yup, as the guys at MacBreak Tech, call it scary fast raid or RAID 0, is where you take two or more drive and combine them into a single drive and the data is split among them. This is called

Scary Fast as it speeds up transfers by writing to multiple disks, but if just one of those disks fail, all is lost.

But back to the post at hand. I have ordered everything I need to run 2 100GB 7200 RPM in a RAID 0 config on my MBP. I went with 100 GB because I already had one. This solution is from MCE and replaces the optical drive (I have only used it for installing Leopard) with a new bay to hold the second hard drive, Mac OSX does the rest. And while it is not a complete hardware solution I have seen test results showing the improved performance.

I have been waiting to do this until Leopard came out with Time Machine. This eases my concerns of data loss due to drive failure. Most of my work is on a SVN server already, but by hooking a 750GB drive to the Airport Extreme and a few command line tricks Time Machine will network back up and the loss should be minimal.

Battery life is said to be a 10-15% loss, but hey, that drain was there when I hooked my external drive up anyway. I will post pictures and details of how it goes. I have one last business trip this year (back to AZ on Sunday) and when I get home Friday, I will do a tear down and install.

Any other unique or warranty voiding upgrades I should know about? Let me know.