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SoftRAID Volumes
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I have a MacMini Server that is connected to a whole bunch of Thunderbolt / USB3 external disks and is serving them to our home network. I am looking to improve the performance of the MacMini, so I want to replace the internal HDDs with SSDs. One of the internal drives is for boot and music. The other is for data: smaller stuff that needs to be fast. Large data goes to the external mechanical disks.
I will back up the internal drives with Time Machine, but if it doesn't cost me performance, I would love to mirror the drives to slower, cheaper secondary external drives. That way if (when) a drive fails, I will be able to run off the secondary until I can replace the primary internal SSD.
So that brings me to my question. Do the secondary drive(s), in a SoftRaid mirror, limit the performance of the array? In other words, is the array limited by the speed of the slowest drive? Or does the array run off the primary and just update the secondary as it gets to it?
Posted : 25/07/2016 9:32 pm
Write speeds will lower performance somewhat. Read speeds will be the same as SoftRAID is intelligent and only reads from the primary when one disk is an SSD. We have a lot of users who do this. You may not notice a major drop off in performance as 80% of I/O's to a volume are reads.
Posted : 26/07/2016 12:40 am
