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Lion 10.7.2 RAID-0 with TonyMacX86 tools & Chimera

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Neil, is this guide work for RAID 10 too?

Thank you!
 
I'm feeling kinda slow. Can someone please make a video for this.
 
Lion 10.7.2 SSD RAID-0

Howdy All,

Just wanted to say a big thanks to Neilhart for this great guide. I was wondering what the best way to inject some new life into my ageing Abit IP35 Pro Hack was, came across this and thought what the hell, I'll give it a go.

I bought 2 Corsair Force GT 120 SSD (synchronous nand SSD's) which are SATA3. The Abit IP35 Pro only has SATA2 controlled by the old Intel ICH9R southbridge, so i was not expecting to much in terms of speed.

But i Got to say the results are quite staggering.

DiskSpeedTest-SSD-Raid0.jpg


Not to shabby for a five year old motherboard running a software raid.

In the pursuit of squeezing the last drop of performance out of this box i've managed to get hold of a LSI SAS3041E-R Hardware Raid controller card ( PCIe 1.0 x 4 ).

The IP35 Pro does have a spare PCIe 1.0 x4 slot available so this is worth a shot. This card normaly retails for over £180 in the UK but i found a guy on Ebay in the states who's got a stack of them and selling them off for £22 plus £11 Shipping. At that price its got to be worth a shot.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/220770487...NX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649#ht_538wt_1413

To be honest I'm not expecting the Hardware Raid to be able to give much higher read speeds than the software raid but i do expect it to be able to improve on the write times. Also in real world use using the PCIe x4 slot allows the Raid to bypass the bottleneck of the ICH9R southbridge controller, so I think it will be faster as long as it works ok with OSX Lion 10.7.2. Which i believe it does ( uses AppleLSIFusionMPT.kext )

Will post results when (if) card arrives in about two weeks.

Cheers
Jay
 
Mate94 said:
Neil, is this guide work for RAID 10 too?

Thank you!


It should work with a RAID 10, however my RAID 10 experience was with Snow Leopard and this guide is for LION. Also, note that I have not built a RAID with the latest Chimera or with Lion 10.7.3.

neil
 
Niel:
You say to open Chimera with Pacifist.
Where is Chimera?? There is no mention of where to find this file? On the multibeast installer? on the installer partition? I have searched everywhere and cant find it?
 
Interesting ....

I Updated my Abit IP35Pro System to 10.7.3 , see here http://tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=169&t=48056&p=309968#p309968

With 10.7.2 and the Multibeast 2.7.1 Trim Enabler, System report said that trim support was disabled on both my SSD's that made up my raid. Now with 10.7.3 It says Trim it is supported ? :thumbup:

10-7-3-trim.jpg


Is it possible that 10.7.3 now supports Trim on software raids ?
Is there anyway to test that it really is using Trim ?

Cheers
Jay
 
@neilhart Thank you very much for this awesome tutorial, worked like a charm! :headbang:

@jaymonkey can you show me your Black Magic Disc Speed Test with Lion?

I have bought 2xCorsair Force GT Series 120GB 6Gb/s and I'm disappointed with this SSDs. Around half of the speeds as in the pictures below is in single mode, this pictures are in RAID-0 mode.
I think I will bring the SSDs back and get the Kingston HyperX. (In this video, only one has the promised speeds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqSrBhQWLpA )


Black Magic:
bildschirmfoto2012-02e4kbm.png


Xbench:
bildschirmfoto2012-02hejgs.png



The funny thing is, that Xbench shows higher rates than Black Magic ?

My System:
Intel Core i7-2600 (non K)
Gigabyte UD3H-B3 Rev 1.3 latest Bios F10
Corsair XMS 16GB 1333 MHz Ram (bought this wrong, does it matter if the RAMs are 1333 or 1600?)
XFX Radeon 6870
2xCorsair Force GT Series 120GB (promised speeds over 500MB/s, read and write)


Edit: Trim is enabled on both SSDs and I also Disabled C3/C6 stepping in the bios, some people solved their problem with this under windows, with this SSDs. Any idea?


Edit2: here are the speeds for my Western Digital Caviar Blue on the SATA 2 port (almost same write speed as my Corsair Force GT 120GB SATA 3 port SSD):
bildschirmfoto2012-021tj2p.png
 
Good news guys, I have the solution for the "mach_kernel" problem. :D

Well, at my first try, everything worked well with the same steps as neilhart. Then, I erased my RAID-0 and tried it like 4-5 times and always got "mach_kernel". :banghead:

PLEASE use the exact same steps like neilhart !!! :!:

After you have done this, open Terminal and type (I have the same disk numbers like neilhart!)

diskutil mount disk0s3
You'll get this: Volume Boot OS X on disk0s3 mounted

Then open "Boot OS X" in Finder and search for this file and open it:
Bildschirmfoto%202012-02-29%20um%2018.17.34.png

com.apple.boot.S/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

This file will look like this:
Bildschirmfoto%202012-02-29%20um%2018.18.03.png


Check here if you have the exakt same RAID Identifier like you've copied from the Disk Utility to your org.chameleon.Boot.plist

In my case, there was another UUID in there and I replaced it with my RAID-UUID. Of course, you have to make it with the second "Boot OS X" partition of your second HDD or SSD (diskutil mount disk1s3). After that, unmount both Boot OS X partitions (in terminal or in Finder).

diskutil unmount disk0s3
diskutil unmount disk1s3


Restart and be sure, that your RAID HDDs or SSDs are on first boot priority in BIOS. ;)

This worked for me and after two days of trying, I can use my SSD-RAID-0 again :mrgreen:

Thank you again neilhart, great tutorial here! :headbang: :thumbup:
 
I am pleased that the guide has passed the test of time. I fear that OS X will change or Chimera and the guide will not work... in this case, I assume that someone will PM me and I can re-address the guide. As the cost of small SSDs has dropped I find less reason to build RAID 0 installations therefore I have not used the guide in several weeks.

neil
 
Very nice thread, thanks.
I dont have ssd, but have raid with 2 mechanical samsung drives(soft raid-win7 partition). Does is worth using raid with mechanical drives under osX?
 
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