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Raid 0 or SSD macbook pro


clark369
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Hello, I am running a fairly old macbook pro- 2.4ghz pre unibody, topped out at 4gb RAM

 

I push it to it's limit doing 3d rendering, a little bit of video editing, and a lot of high rez retouching and compositing (tiff's reaching 5gb)

The laptop is struggling, and it is effecting my productivity (meaning I get plenty of time to put my feet up and relax)- I'm hoping to get a full time job in this where a mac pro will be provided, but to tide me over i'm looking to upgrade my laptop.

 

I'd get an imac if it wasn't for the glossy screen, and i'd be tempted by a quad core mac mini server (assuming you can run standard leopard on it?) and hook it up to my pro-grade IPS monitor, a mac pro is out of budget, and a new laptop is an option, but not for a while.

 

So my thoughts are to upgrade the HDD in my laptop, i'm currently running a 500gb momentus xt hybrid and it was a serious improvement over my old 5400rpm drive. I was contemplating getting another momentus and running them as raid 0- or getting a 120gb OWC SSD and running the OS and programs on that- I backup regularly so I'm not bothered about the potential failing (and i'm convinced that back-up drives are just a clever marketing ploy to get people to buy 2 hard drives)

 

In an idea world i'd like to be able to migrate all my settings over to the new drive, as i've got templates, presets, fonts and stuff and would need to get back to work with minimal downtime.

 

I also have an E-sata card, and an e-sata enclosure in 2.5" and 3.5"- I could have an external drive as scratch space, but I don't really know if this would be very useful. My issue with e-sata (other than it keeps crashing) is that it's still requires the drive to be plugged into usb for power- other than upgrading the laptop, or using firewire drives, is there any single cable solution for a fast external drive- I presume adding a usb 3 card wouldn't work for my laptop?

 

thanks

Mr James

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  • 3 weeks later...

Put the SSD HDD inside your macbook, as your main partition and use the 500 gig in an external firewire 800 enclosure. The SSD gives a speed bump, limited by the bus speed/ data transfer rate of the macbook. It would be better to use esata as you get the full bandwidth. You may want to research external enclosures, because I'm a little confused about them crashing. I suspect there's a speed issue there that's causing a clash/ crash.

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