Hybrid SSD + HDD setup - all working ok

[rankrotten]

Did a fresh install on an OCZ Vertex 4 256 SSD and was, eventually, very satisfied with the speedy response on my system. One thing that did worry me was the constant writing to the SSD so I moved some of my "heavy use" home folders off the SSD and onto a spare HDD in the rig.

I moved and symbolically linked back my user Desktop, Downloads, Documents, Music, Movies and Pictures folders to a separate HDD and kept the System, Applications and Library on the Vertex SSD for fast access.

I know that the advanced section of system accounts preferences Users and Groups can offload the entire home folder to another disk but this would nullify fast application launching and cache access and I figured that cherry-picking which directories to move would be best.

Sleep, resume, shutdown all work fine as the modifications are totally transparent to the OS. Still got 234GB free on the SSD for future use.

One last thing which initially puzzled me was that the SATA 6 ports on my X58A-UD5 were not giving me the transfer speeds I was expecting, turns out that the early SATA 6 implementation on this Marvell controller was flawed. I sourced a Rocket Raid 2720SGL PCI express 2.0 card and hooked the SSD up to it, now getting reliable 500MB/s transfers.

 

[thelostswede]

Interesting, how did you get that card to work?
It's not meant to be OS X compatible, so some more details would be very useful.

And don't worry about the life span of the SSD, even as a heavy user, that drive should last you a good five years.

 

[rankrotten]

Interesting, how did you get that card to work?
It's not meant to be OS X compatible, so some more details would be very useful.

Mac drivers for 10.7 are on this page
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/C ... ation.html
Apparently newer drivers are included with Mac OS X 10.8 by default.

 

[thelostswede]

I found the driver page. Any idea why the SGL version is so much cheaper?
The only difference appear to be the lack of cables, but that's a good thing in this case.
And native support would be sweet.
We have a fair few users looking for a solution like this.

 

[rankrotten]

Yep, card arrived on Friday evening and I slotted it in place and thought hmm, that's a strange looking SATA port Straight on to Amazon and a Saturday morning delivery of a SAS to 4x SATA cable..

Amazing card, it needs 8 pci lanes as opposed to the cheap cards which chug along on a pci x1 slot.

Not tried it with RAID but it does come with a clever web interface to set up and manage an array.

 

[rankrotten]

Confirmed working in ML 10.8

Confirmed working natively in 10.8 with built-in support - Highpoint RR.kext is part of the stock Mountain Lion install.

Strangely the SSD shows as as a detachable SCSI drive when attached to the card in 10.8. All the other drives have the correct internal labels.

http://www.tonymacx86.com/images/attach/png.gif