# How I setup my Mac for Snow Leopard



## edgley (Sep 3, 2009)

With the arrival of a new OS it was time for a complete nuke; hard to lose 2' years of PC experience  
I found this site to be an excellent source of information for how to get the max from my Pro: http://macperformanceguide.com/

I have been running a complex software RAID for a while, but after using their disk performance tool I saw that the numbers were not what they should have been. I was only getting 6'/7' MBs for read/write, far lower than I should.

So I setup a new software RAID, installed SL and tested again; and again; again (got an install of SL down to 13minutes by using a disk image on an external HD rather than the DVD).

Here is the best performance setup I found.
I have 4 x 32'GB disks.I set a boot partition on all of them of 2'GB called Boot, an 8GB called scratch and the remaining was called data. I then setup a stripped RAID for each of the named partitions, resulting in an 8'GB Boot, 32GB scratch and over 1TB in Data.

Now I am getting +3''MBs read /+2''MBs write on the two smaller RAIDS, and the large one (where my catalogue lives) is getting 2''/18'. Performance increase of this size would cost $$$ from Apple.

I will be playing with adding another small RAID for just storing my photos to see if I can get even faster from it. Only thing to note is TM is a must; if one disk fails all of the data is lost with stripping.

Last note, hold done 4 and 6 when your Mac boots and you can get it to load a 64B Kernel for even more performance, so long as its newish.


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## Victoria Bampton (Sep 10, 2009)

Nice report edgley. Ok, I'm interested.... how do you check the read/write speeds?


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## edgley (Sep 14, 2009)

On the macperformance website link in my post, there is a section where all the software is listed. It costs $24, but seems worth it for what it can allow.
A new disk in my MBP has increased its disk speed three times!


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## Victoria Bampton (Sep 14, 2009)

Thanks edgley


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