Putting a RAID 0 (striped) disk array in your laptop is a double edged sword. One the one hand, it’s twice as likely to have a disk failure. One the other hand, it can make disk-bound activity, such as uncompressed video reading and writing, much faster. Frankly, with processor, bus and memory speeds as fast as they are, disk IO is often times the weakest link… which makes that risky performance upgrade all the more tempting.
Eric Cheng recently posted his experiments on getting RAID 0 working with a Macbook Pro:
Subjectively, the system feels more snappy, and I’m happy to have made the upgrade. I use up at least 20-30GB per week in the field, and it will be great to be able to work on my notebook without having an external drive chained to it.
As for the disk failure issue, we all back up nightly anyway, don’t we?
ADVERTISEMENT
