Mac El Capitan - Not Climbing That Mountain...

WARNING:  Blog Post Only Relevant To Mac Geeks.

Reading a ton of news feeds every morning pays off occasionally.  This morning, I ran across an editorial rant about Apple's new OS X version, "El Capitan."  Boy oh boy am I glad I read it.  IF you use RAID on a Mac, read on.

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

You knew that, sorry.

In English - that means "hey, see those hard disks?  Let's treat them as one big fat drive."

There's a range of RAID standards - from RAID0, which basically spreads data evenly like so much peanut butter across the disks, to RAID5, which keeps track of everything down to how the peanuts were raised (ethically, free-range grazing, parity, striping, etc.)

The only computer I've ever had that didn't eventually piss me off for being too slow - my Mac Pro.  The one I'm typing on now. Love ya big guy.  It's not the gorgeous Darth Vader's Coffee Cup new Mac Pro.  It's the big silver yeah who you lookin' at tower.

Why so good?

Because a number of years ago, when they cost more than Kleenex, I slapped a matching pair of SSDs in and set them to run in RAID 0 config. That's my system drive - two SSDs. It's just STUPID fast.  Yeah, it's risky - if one drive pukes, the whole thing is dead.  Meh, that's why I back up about 4 different ways all the time.  Give me second-to-second speed over hour-to-hour safety any day, at least for getting things done. This machine smokes. If Santa brings me the new Mac Pro, I'd do the same thing - OOPS, wait, no, now I couldn't because El Capitan DOESN'T SUPPORT RAID.

So El Capitan = falling off one big ugly cliff.  If I hadn't read that article, I might have tried it. Disaster - system drive not recognizable.  

This is a bad decision on Apple's part, I think.  Yeah, most consumers think RAID kills bugs daid.  But seriously, they also NEVER touch Disk Utility.  Those of us that do...those of us that have paid Apple a LOT of dough over a lot of years, not just the last 5...do not appreciate high-handed simplification.  Final Cut Pro X. Pages and Keynote.  Quicktime "Pro" vs Quicktime 7.  Stop mistaking stripping for simplification, especially when it comes to technical standards. 

I'm pretty sure there will be a point in the future where I'm faced with upgrading the OS, or NOT being able to use some app.  Until then, with some regret, I'm going to hang back and not jump off the El Capitan cliff. I suspect many of my compadres in the media world - especially if they're aware of this RAID on their disk utility - will follow suit.  Bah. 

--md

see http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2015/20151008_1222-SoftRAID-vs-DiskUtility.html