SSD as boot drive in MacPro

[clay]

bazookaman wrote:
How would a 2 disk 7200rpm striped RAID compare to an SSD?

Just did a test on my work machine that currently has a 3 drive internal RAID (WD 1TB Black x 3) and an OWC 120 GB SSD. Results will be slightly lower for a 2 drive RAID, of course.

SSD:


Internal 3 drive striped RAID:

[bazookaman]

clay wrote:
[quote=sekker]
I am not sure what problems clay the party-pooper had...

Here's my situation for my home machine:

Mac Pro, 4 internal SATA bays (2 optical bays already in use with 2 DVD burners)

Mac HD - OS/User drive
Projects - aptly named drive on which I store projects and data for freelance/personal projects (video, audio, web design, etc)
Projects_backup - a daily clone of "Projects". The data on "projects" is important enough that I feel better having an onsite clone. I do keep another bare drive offsite with the same data that gets updated as needed
TimeMachine - this is a backup of the Mac HD drive only

This next part is a little convoluted and long, so don't read if you get bored easily.

To switch the Mac HD to an SSD and do the separate OS/Users locations, I would have needed another drive in play. And since all 4 bays are already filled, that would have meant an external drive in constant use, which is not something I wanted to deal with or pay for. Or, I could have purchased all new larger drives for internal use and re-jiggered my backup routine to remove the "Projects_backup" from play, and sent everything to TimeMachine. But, that would have meant significant expense (probably $200+) in addition to the cost of the SSD just to get up and running again. Not to mention that I prefer to keep a clone of the SSD on hand in case it fails so I can be back up and running again quickly. I did have an SSD (a quality one) fail after a month of use without a clone in place (I did have TimeMachine backup, though), so I feel like it's important to have that going. This doesn't even address the issue of splitting the OS and Users data, which complicates things further, because the Users data would probably need to go on my "Projects" drive, filling it up and requiring the purchase of another larger drive for that as well.

Suffice it to say that I didn't NEED the SSD in order for my home machine to still be useful, so I sold it and went back to a platter drive.
Well when you put it that way, I can see how problematic things would be. I have a much "leaner" setup. Since offloading my media to an external RAID, I now only have 1 2tb drive in my MacPro. I back that up every few days to an external 2tb drive. I also back that up to my Crashplan account. It is also backed up to a drive here at the office.

At any rate. It's backed up...a lot. So basically what i would be doing is taking an SSD, popping it into the MacPro and basically housing everything but my User directory on it. The User directory (which holds my photos, my itunes, my projects etc) would stay on the 2tb drive.

If I added an SSD, i would add that to my Crashplan account as well as back it up to a 2.5 inch external.