Just came across this thread and thought I would chip in.
A separate loader drive is not required at all.
I have a Dell XPS 9530 laptop with a SATA and mSATA slot.
The SATA HDD is replaced with a Samsung EVO840 1TB SATA SSD and the mSATA slot is replaced with a Samsung EVO840 1TB mSATA SSD.
These are configured in SATA AHCI mode in the bios. The AppleRAID is configured as a RAID-0 across 200 GB partitions at the start of each SATA SSD.
View attachment 123192
The speeds are great for bootup and running virtual machines.
It would be faster even with the newer laptops like the Asus which has dual PCIe SSD slots.
I have been running on AppleRAID since Mavericks using Clover and everything works great out of the box.
Booting Clover happens from the AppleRAID drive itself, and from any Clover USB I use for debugging.
Additionally booting an external installation of OS X from USB also mounts and shows the AppleRAID just fine.
I install / update Clover manually, for which I have made quick terminal command:
Code:
alias efi='diskutil mount 79635BDD-02F2-46C4-9DCD-876CD925EC5B'
This alias is in my .bash_profile, so in the terminal I just have to type "efi" to mount the right boot folder.
Note that your GUID would be different and unique to your partition, you can find it in "disk utility -> get info".
This is required because sometimes the drives are detected in a different order, i.e. disk0 is not always disk0 but sometimes becomes disk1.
The disk layout is as follows:
Code:
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_RAID 200.0 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk0s3
4: Apple_HFS Storage 799.7 GB disk0s4
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk1
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1
2: Apple_RAID 200.0 GB disk1s2
3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk1s3
4: Microsoft Basic Data Windows 8.1 799.9 GB disk1s4
The EFI holding Clover in the above view is on /dev/disk1s1. The EFI partition on the other disk is empty.
Note that I am also dual booting with Windows 8.1 (for gaming...)
The AppleRAID is configured as follows:
Code:
AppleRAID sets (1 found)
===============================================================================
Name: OS X
Unique ID: 1A47ABAB-FA4C-4AEB-9EC6-711FA476A5E4
Type: Stripe
Status: Online
Size: 400.0 GB (399999762432 Bytes)
Rebuild: manual
Device Node: disk2
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# DevNode UUID Status Size
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0 disk0s2 E2BE8856-F4BD-4AFF-83DF-6C0A117DA24B Online 199999881216
1 disk1s2 20D52CD0-34B7-4307-8BCA-10DDF46A658A Online 199999881216
===============================================================================
I can suggest this setup to everyone, its rock solid across OS X versions as well as internal and external boot methods. All functionality of OS X is fully working and functional.
Note that I do not have a recovery drive though, as the installer does not support that option in my configuration. But as mentioned I have an external 16GB USB3 drive with Clover and an OS X installation that I can boot from to quickly repair any issues I might have with the main installation.