Will Mac Leopard "RAID-0" Three Mtron Pro SSDs?

[MacBill]

About to buy a 2008, 3.2GHz MacPro and want the mass storage to be Mtron Pro SSDs.

1) Will Mac OS-X Leopard provide software-RAID-0 of three Mtron Pro SSDs for a boot disk?

2) If so, what serial write throughput speed should I expect for three RAID-0 Mtron Pro's?
(Single Mtron Pro SSD serial write throughput is ~80 MB/sec)

3) If Leopard S/W won't RAID-0 Mtron Pro SSd's, will Apples new RAID-0 card?

 

[jkresh]

If you are going to spend $3000+ (probably closer to $6000) for ssd drives then do not use software raid! Also what are you using this system for, the ssd's have increadible read spead and access time but their write speed is not that good so depending on what you are using it for a SAS array (with 15k drives) may be faster (and will definitely have a lower cost per GB).

 

[vailr]

The Apple Raid card is over $1,000.
This areca card is only $200.
areca ARC-1200 PCI Express SATA Controller Card
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16816151031
Combine with "Raid 0" 10,000 RPM WD Raptors & should be plenty fast enough.

 

[MacBill]

The heaviest-duty use is intensively editing ~15MB digital photo RAW files (3,000 this year). Most will be "batch corrected" with DXO's (multi-threaded) auto-editing S/W, then manually touched up.

The SAS 15K-HDD RAID-0 array can match the Mtron Pro SSD array's ~240MB/sec "SERIAL write throughput," but the HDD array average access would be ~6 msec vs. 0.1 msec for the SSD--So wouldn't the Mtron SSD array's RANDOM write speed (each Mtron SSD = 80 MB/sec) blow the HDD array away for intensive small-file transfers, (and boot up, etc.)?

I'd read that 300 MB/sec S/W RAID-0 is easily done except the CPU load can slow down the rest of the machine. (This machine has eight 3.2GHz CPU's so loading one of 'em with RAID-0 shouldn't matter.

I've also read that:
1) Apple's RAID card is only compatible with Apple HDDs(?)
2) The only 3rd party RAID card that will boot a MacPro is the ATTO Express SAS R348 which tested slower than almost any other RAID card on conventional HDD's.

So that's why I'm asking if OS-X Leopard's S/W RAID-0 would run the Mtron Pro SSD at high (~300 MB/sec).

Are you pretty sure Leopard's S/W RAID-0 will be too slow??

 

[vailr]

You'd probably want to max out the system memory, instead of trying to have a super-fast boot drive.
However, Apple will charge much higher prices for their memory, as opposed to upgrading yourself
with 3rd-party memory from online vendors.
Are you going to wait for the updated Mac Pro with Penryn CPUs, that'll supposedly be announced next month?
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