Today marks a few important turning points in terms of data handling…

1) I moved unto a HUGE SSD drive
2) I moved my portable external storage to a dual drive RAID-0

The SSD is definitely a good move. Bootup times are cut by more than half, shutdown times are almost instant. Sleep and recover times are also incredibly fast. In terms of general usage, mail load times and web browsing seems to have improved too. Heat also seems to be a problem that gone away.

SSDs… definitely a good buy if you can afford it.

So what about having my portable external storage moving unto RAID-0? This used to go against all my principles of data protection. Having 2 drives owning a single piece of data only increases the failure probability by half. So why did i do it? Mainly for performance i guess. Somehow, i can’t turn off the temptation for speed.

A single USB 2.0 drive doesn’t give me more than 31MB/s in the best of circumstances. That would have been ok if my internal drive was a old school spinning HD. But now with a SSD, a RAID-0 with a FireWire 800 cable gives me 80-90MB/s. Thats almost 2.5x what i used to get. I can even almost max my bandwidth at home now doing networked transfers. Transferring 159GB of files now only takes ~ 30 mins on this pair of drives.

I suppose the only sad thing now is that the RAID set is not Hardware RAIDed as the software doesn’t yet support my OS. But i just used SW RAID to get these results.

So what about data protection? At this point, i don’t know. i suppose its a risk i am willing to take…