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USB 3.0 SSD RAID - Cheaper and fast external storage solution

Xinyun Zhou 4 min read Archived
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Background

Recently I got a MacBook Pro as my daily-use machine. As MacBook Pros are too expensive, I decided to go for the 13" mid-configuration (A$1750 for a 13" machine with 8G RAM and 256G SSD) as I don’t need a graphics card or a powerful CPU. I got the machine at JB Hi-Fi (yes, that is the name of an Australian company) so there is no way for me to upgrade the solid-state drive. Also the 2014 MacBook Pro is so locked down, meaning there is no reason for you to open it up because there is no way to upgrade anything. I have no choice but to use external storage.

Use Case

The reason I want to have external storage is for virtual machines. I use a lot of virtual machines (Linux, Windows) to do my development work (programming and testing) and also use them to finish my uni assignments. For the MacBook itself, after I installed the software that I need (Adobe Creative Cloud, PhpStorm, IntelliJ and many more), I have about 150G left. I need about 120G for a few Windows machines and 50~80G for a few Linux machines.

When you run operating systems on an external drive, it needs to have a fast read speed and a reasonable write speed. This is just my case, as I don’t do media work so I don’t have to worry that the drive is not good enough for editing 1080p video, or for some professionals out there, editing 4K video. I just need the speed to be reasonably fast so I don’t lose my patience when debugging the IE 8 compatibility issue on a Windows XP machine, nor when testing emails in Outlook 2013.

My Solution

Initially, I just got a normal USB 3.0 spinning hard drive, which I gave up using after about 30 minutes. It’s just too slow to run virtual machines on it.

Then I started to look for better solutions. I came across a few options:

  • Pre-built Thunderbolt 2 SSD RAID, by LaCie: Yes you are right, this damn thing costs A$1600 at the time of writing this article. The specification claims it to have 1,375MB/1,180MB read/write speeds per second. I love it, but it is way beyond my budget!
  • WD My Passport Pro 2TB: This was under consideration initially, as it is not too expensive yet performs at 230MB read/write per second. Then I found that I have two spare SSDs (two 128G SSDs from OCZ Vector) and a 1TB drive I bought earlier. I found a few reviews about this drive but as it seems to be pretty new there is not much information about it.
  • No brand, I decided to go for two 250G SSDs with USB 3.0 enclosures. The total cost for me is about A$30 (I only need to buy two hard drive enclosures, so for you it may be around A$250).

The Setup & Benchmark

I used the default Disk Utility to configure the RAID. You can just create a RAID 0 array and then add your volumes to that RAID configuration. Then you will be able to format them and start to use them. I won’t provide too many details here as I think you will be able to find great tutorials on how to set them up. Here are the benchmarks: (around 470MB/s)

Conclusion

This setup did save me some money, and here is a brief summary of the pros and cons:

Pros:

  • Cheap and easy to set up.
  • Configuration is really flexible; you can get different SSDs or use existing ones.
  • Speed is faster than an HDD, and I am really happy with the performance.

Cons:

  • Two USB cables will use up all the ports of your MacBook Pro.
  • Having two USB cables is really annoying, but that’s what you pay for the low price.

Update (May 14, 2014)

I got a USB 3.0 hub for these two drives, as I think the theoretical speed of USB 3.0 is 5Gbit/s or 625MB/s, so one USB hub may be able to handle the speed above. However, the reality is about 270MB/s. I haven’t tried any other USB hub so I am not sure whether it’s the problem of the USB hub or the limitation of the port speed.