12-21-2009, 02:58 PM

I hope someone can shed some light on this for me, i have one of the new dual xeon mac pro's and i have just purchased 2x corsair x32 ssd's to go inside it setup in raid 0.

would i get bigger speed increase using a raid card rather than the integrated raid and if so are there any cheapish raid cards that work with the mac pro and snow leopard?

many thx

12-21-2009, 03:01 PM

Yes. Hardware RAID is always superior to software RAID. Although I would caution you on using RAID0, unless you're making regular full backups. SSDs are reliable, but if the RAID set is ever damaged or the file system is corrupted in anyway, you'll lose all of your data. It's always better to run in RAID5 whenever possible.

12-21-2009, 03:03 PM

thanks, any suggestions on a raid card as im a newb with the mac?

12-23-2009, 04:32 PM

gone for the mac raid card as software aid was too slow

12-24-2009, 03:28 PM

The Apple RAID card is the only one you could fit anyway, its pricey but darn fast!

I run a RAID0 array on mine and it is quick even on standard 7,200 disks, although with smaller files it isn't of an improvement.

RAID should never be treated as a backup solution anyway, if you accidentally delete a file you will still lose it. Always have a backup, no matter what RAID you run.

Wouldn't mind hooking up a couple of SSDs on mine, you're gonna love it!

12-24-2009, 03:54 PM

Originally Posted by martyp

RAID should never be treated as a backup solution anyway, if you accidentally delete a file you will still lose it. Always have a backup, no matter what RAID you run.

I wasn't implying that - what I was implying is that there is a higher risk associated with volume integrity when you're using RAID 0. With RAID 5, you get all of the performance benefits with the added benefit of fault tolerance.