Creating a RAID 0 Array to increase Disk Performance on a Mac Pro Tower

by: nobasho

1) keep one drive aside for the boot volume, or use an external firewire 800 drive for your system files.
-do NOT keep anything but system files on there. -create 2 partitions, one around 64GB for the system files (as the outside part of the drive is much faster than the inside of the spindle), and the other to not be used, or to put documents (mp3′s etc) on to.
2) use the remaining 3 (or 4, if you’re using an external drive for your boot volume) drives, and configure them into a striped 0 RAID volume:
-#1 option would be to use a Hardware RAID card (but these are very expensive). -#2 option would be to use “Softraid” to create a software RAID (but it costs $129). SoftRaid may be better than Apple’s “Disk Utility” for the following 2 reasons: -supports multi-threading (assigns one thread per CPU core) for disk writing/reading (vs single threading of Apple’s “Disk Utility”, which may increase disk performance. -apparently has a better user-interface. -#3 option is to use Apple’s built in “Disk Utililty”, which is still (*apparently) quite good. -Choosing your “block size”: -click the “Options” tab, when creating the array. -Since the system/user files are on a separate disk, and are not a part of the RAID, choose your “block size”, depending on the type (size) of files that you will be working with mostly. For larger files, a larger block size will give better read/write performance (*apparently). So, for Video/Audio editing, a block size of 128/256 KB is preferred (*apparently).
And you’re done!
Note: Another advanced option that you can choose to do is the following: -before you create the RAID, you can create 2 partitions on each disk (50/50), one using the outside of the hard drive spindle (the fastest part of the disk), and one using the rest of the disk (which you can choose not to actually store data on). Now create the RAID using the four fast partitions. -i.e., if you were using 4X 1TB internal hard drives, you could allocate 500GB from each disk (for a total of 2TB), and create a RAID out of these partitions.
*from google research.*some of this from: http://macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html