Mac Pro RAID Card Installation

[Transeau]

I just received my controller via FedEx Overnight. I figured I'd post the unpacking pics before I started the install.

http://gallery.mac.com/djoyce101/100008

It looks like the install is a bit complicated. all of the shrouding needs to be pulled out, and the iPass cable needs to be pulled from the motherboard and attached to the card. I'm going to take the time to connect an external SATA while I'm in there.

I'll try and get some benchmarks for you guys too. Nothing too fancy, just going to compare RAID 0/1/1+0, Sorry, not on a full install, that would just take too long.

[Transeau]

Okay, that was fun. It took about 30 minutes to install the card.
The hardest part by far was getting the iPass cable connected to the card. It's in a very tight location, and you have to plug the cable in with the card installed. Here is a quick benchmark...



Single 150GB Raptor - 77.33
SoftRAID: 2x 160GB RAID 0 - 116.89
SoftRAID: 4x 160GB RAID 0 - 215.93
Hardware RAID: 2x 160GB RAID 0 NO WRITE CACHE - 247.26
Hardware RAID: 4x 160GB RAID 0 NO WRITE CACHE - 332.63


I'll try the same hardware RAID tests with the write cache on once the battery charges... This leads me to my notes.


The battery did not come charged, so the write cache is disabled until the charge is completed.
The RAID utility provides no way of telling how much charge the battery has, or a time frame until complete.
Disk Utility is not used to create the RAID volumes, once the array is set. Once the volume is online, the Disk Utility can see the volume and access it.
Disk Utility reports the RAID Volume as SAS
Full status is available in the System Profiler (less the battery level)
It looks like the card does in fact support SAS drives.
initial system power-on is longer as the controller spins the drives up one at a time. (Good news for those who are going to run 4x 15,000RPM SAS drives)
The card is PCIe x8, you will need to make sure you have your slots configured correctly for maximum performance.


The battery being DOA is a BIG bother to me. This causes RAID 1+0 and RAID 5 to take A LONG TIME to resync. we are talking hours here.

More later, once the battery charges.

[Transeau]

VERY VERY VERY annoyed with the lack of info on the battery status.
"Charging" doesn't help me. I want to know HOW LONG.

[hayduke]

So how do you migrate from separate drives to a single RAID5? Right now I have four drives (two of them back up to the other two nightly), but I'd like to get the RAID card. I don't understand your comment #3. Is there additional software besides Disk Utility to manages the RAID array? Also, are you benchmarks MB/s? Keep us updated!

[Transeau]

So how do you migrate from separate drives to a single RAID5? Right now I have four drives (two of them back up to the other two nightly), but I'd like to get the RAID card. I don't understand your comment #3. Is there additional software besides Disk Utility to manages the RAID array? Also, are you benchmarks MB/s? Keep us updated!

Comment #3... You use the RAID Utility to configure the RAID Array, and the initial Volume. Once the volume is created via the RAID Utility you can use Disk Utility to do the normal stuff.

Migrating can be tricky, based on how much data you have. And VERY slow. It's best to backup everything and restore it to a new array.

Benchmarks are an Xbench Disk-Only score.. I'll post a RAID-5 score as soon as the damn battery charges.

[Transeau]

one more note - don't bother installing to a RAID-5 or RAID 1+0 array until it's finished Initializing. A "format and install" causes the installer to freak out because it can't remount the drive, and a standard install is REALLY REALLY REALLY slow.

My RAID-5 is at 95%..... 2 hours in. Thank god I used the 160GB's and not the 500GB's!

[hayduke]

one more note - don't bother installing to a RAID-5 or RAID 1+0 array until it's finished Initializing. A "format and install" causes the installer to freak out because it can't remount the drive, and a standard install is REALLY REALLY REALLY slow.

My RAID-5 is at 95%..... 2 hours in. Thank god I used the 160GB's and not the 500GB's!

Sorry...I'm not following you. Presumably after installing the card and reconnecting the drives the machine boots and everything looks as it once did. The RAID utility then let's you configure whether you want RAID0/1/0+1/5 etc., right? Is this what you call "initializing" (above)? After that you can transfer data from (presumably) an external drive? Do you have an eSata card? There's no eSata on the RAID card, right? It makes sense that you would want to archive to an external drive and then migrate that to the new RAID, but it sounds like the RAID utility can handle (albeit slowly) the RAID set-up and migration...is that right?

I suppose this would all make sense if I had the RAID Utility to look at.

Lastly, what is your back-up strategy? Do you have a eSATA that you back-up to? Firewire? NAS?

[trancepriest]

Transeau,

Is your OS on the RAID volume? I am interested in a RAID 5 setup with Leopard running on the volume. Any information you can report on this would be appreciated. My order shipped out today... should receive it by Wednesday or Tuesday. Your posts have been very helpful in understanding the setup... Thank You.

[Transeau]

Oh Dear God This is insane!

Please, for the love of God and for your own good... put the card in your box and let it charge fully before connecting the drives to it.

Setup hung and I hard to cold-start the box. This caused the volume to show an error and now the system is slow. REAL slow, like almost 20 minutes to boot.

This is stupid. 8 hours of charging now and still not charged. I think Apple REALLY dropped the ball on this. There is no reason that they couldn't have shipped it with a charged battery.

[hayduke]

Oh Dear God This is insane!

Please, for the love of God and for your own good... put the card in your box and let it charge fully before connecting the drives to it.

Setup hung and I hard to cold-start the box. This caused the volume to show an error and now the system is slow. REAL slow, like almost 20 minutes to boot.

This is stupid. 8 hours of charging now and still not charged. I think Apple REALLY dropped the ball on this. There is no reason that they couldn't have shipped it with a charged battery.

Maybe they'll offer a fully charged version in two weeks for an extra $100. Sorry...searching for some levity...

At least your efforts will save me and others some time.

[Transeau]

Transeau,

Is your OS on the RAID volume? I am interested in a RAID 5 setup with Leopard running on the volume. Any information you can report on this would be appreciated. My order shipped out today... should receive it by Wednesday or Tuesday. Your posts have been very helpful in understanding the setup... Thank You.

Yes, The Leopard installer has the RAID utility built in. I was able to boot from the Leopard DVD, Configure the RAID Set and the Volume as a RAID-5 setup, then installed to the new Volume created.

HOWEVER, I don't recommend this.

FIRST, put the card in you Mac Pro BEFORE doing the full hardware installation. Let the battery fully charge for 24 hours.
SECOND, once you create the RAID-5 (or RAID 1+0) set, allow the new volume to Initialize FULLY before starting the leopard install.

Doing these two things will make your life MUCH simpler.

[Transeau]

Sorry...I'm not following you. Presumably after installing the card and reconnecting the drives the machine boots and everything looks as it once did. The RAID utility then let's you configure whether you want RAID0/1/0+1/5 etc., right? Is this what you call "initializing" (above)? After that you can transfer data from (presumably) an external drive? Do you have an eSata card? There's no eSata on the RAID card, right? It makes sense that you would want to archive to an external drive and then migrate that to the new RAID, but it sounds like the RAID utility can handle (albeit slowly) the RAID set-up and migration...is that right?

I suppose this would all make sense if I had the RAID Utility to look at.

Lastly, what is your back-up strategy? Do you have a eSATA that you back-up to? Firewire? NAS?


Okay, lets backup a little...
The RAID Utility (Built into Leopard and 10.4.10) is a very simple utility used to configure the drives attached to the controller. Once you select your configuration, you may need to initialize it. RAID 1+0, RAID 1 and RAID 5 require initialization, while JBOD and RAID 0 do not. (Fault Tolerant vs Non-Fault Tolerant) You are still able to read and write to a drive while it is "in transition" (as Apple calls it), however it is VERY VERY slow.

Next.. Personally, I prefer to never Archive and Install. I ALWAYS have my home folder fully backed up, and I keep many of my 3rd party apps in there. So, I didn't transfer anything to the new RAID yet. At this time, I only have 10.5 installed.

Migrating - In my experience with RAID, I've always found that it's faster to backup data and restore it to a new Array than to migrate drives into an array.

eSATA - No, the card has no external connections. In fact the only connection it has (other than the PCIe) is the iPass connection to the drives. I do have a SATA to eSATA cable in the box, but it's mostly unused.

Lastly, my backup strategy. I have an external 500GB Firewire 800 drive. (a G-Drive) that I'm using for Time Machine. I have several folders that are excluded to keep it from filling up to quickly. So, Time Machine is basically my hourly / daily backup. Next I have an Infrant ReadyNAS NV 1.5TB NAS on Gigabit (with jumbo frames) that is my nightly and weekly backup. Each of our desktops and notebooks gets backed up to it at least once a week. It's actually almost out of space again, once the new firmware is out, I'll get bumped up to 3TB (4x 1TB, X-RAID)

I think I answered everything...

[hayduke]

Okay, lets backup a little...
The RAID Utility (Built into Leopard and 10.4.10) is a very simple utility used to configure the drives attached to the controller. Once you select your configuration, you may need to initialize it. RAID 1+0, RAID 1 and RAID 5 require initialization, while JBOD and RAID 0 do not. (Fault Tolerant vs Non-Fault Tolerant) You are still able to read and write to a drive while it is "in transition" (as Apple calls it), however it is VERY VERY slow.

Next.. Personally, I prefer to never Archive and Install. I ALWAYS have my home folder fully backed up, and I keep many of my 3rd party apps in there. So, I didn't transfer anything to the new RAID yet. At this time, I only have 10.5 installed.

Migrating - In my experience with RAID, I've always found that it's faster to backup data and restore it to a new Array than to migrate drives into an array.

eSATA - No, the card has no external connections. In fact the only connection it has (other than the PCIe) is the iPass connection to the drives. I do have a SATA to eSATA cable in the box, but it's mostly unused.

Lastly, my backup strategy. I have an external 500GB Firewire 800 drive. (a G-Drive) that I'm using for Time Machine. I have several folders that are excluded to keep it from filling up to quickly. So, Time Machine is basically my hourly / daily backup. Next I have an Infrant ReadyNAS NV 1.5TB NAS on Gigabit (with jumbo frames) that is my nightly and weekly backup. Each of our desktops and notebooks gets backed up to it at least once a week. It's actually almost out of space again, once the new firmware is out, I'll get bumped up to 3TB (4x 1TB, X-RAID)

I think I answered everything...

Excellent. Very helpful. I'll be migrating to a very similar set-up soon. Thanks for clarifying everything.

[Macinposh]

Woot!

Cheers Transeau!
Greatly appreciated about the tests and reviews,good info for all of us.


Ps.
Have you used your eSata cable a lot?
Have it worked well?What kind of transfer speeds have you gotten out of it,if you have tested it?

[trancepriest]

Yes, The Leopard installer has the RAID utility built in. I was able to boot from the Leopard DVD, Configure the RAID Set and the Volume as a RAID-5 setup, then installed to the new Volume created.

Thanks for the info. Will definitely install it per your instructions and let the battery charge. I'm hoping that my battery comes charged though.

[Transeau]

19 hours and still not charged. I'm wondering if I got a defective card or battery.

[Cromulent]

19 hours and still not charged. I'm wondering if I got a defective card or battery.

It could take anything up to 72 hours I would imagine. Have you tried calling Apple about it?

[Transeau]

No, I haven't called yet. For the time being, I've reinstalled on a RAID 0 stripe. I need a usable box this weekend. I'll have to deal with the RAID-5 later.

I have another gripe. Not so much about the card, but the software. They provide NO advanced configuration. EVERY RAID controller I've ever used has had an Expert setup. I would like to be able to configure the chunk size, read-ahead, etc on my own and not just let a simple GUI do it for me.

Oh yeah... Installing on a 4 Drive Stripe, from a USB drive takes about 4 minutes :)

[Cromulent]

It looks like the card does in fact support SAS drives.


I would be very interested in knowing if you can put 15k RPM SAS drives in a Mac Pro with this card.

[trancepriest]

19 hours and still not charged. I'm wondering if I got a defective card or battery.

Seems absurd that it would take over 24 hours to charge the battery. Any information you can find relating to battery charge time would be very appreciated. I'm planning to install on a new RAID 5 volume. I don't really have that much data to carry over so no backup worries.

[Transeau]

40 minutes of phone support with Apple.... WOW...

Did you install the card in a Mac Pro?
...I answered "No, It's a Mac Mini" Just felt like being a dick.

Did you connect the battery?
"Uh, yeah. I followed the directions"

When did you start getting the low battery alerts?
"When I installed the card, 24 hours ago"

What about before, no RAID errors?
"No, I didn't get any RAID errors without having RAID."


Does Apple actually train people? Or are end users REALLY that stupid?

[termina3]

Does Apple actually train people? Or are end users REALLY that stupid?

My semi-ignorant understanding is they get basic training in common problems, but are often over their heads in advanced Mac Pro issues. Ergo, they're given a list of questions on their computer to ask. (If the caller answers no, say this and ask that. If he answers yes, ask this and this.)

[trancepriest]

Does Apple actually train people? Or are end users REALLY that stupid?

They have no idea what a Mac Pro RAID card is. I went into a local Apple Store last week and asked if they had one... the guy gave me a strange look... I could tell he never heard of it before.

It sucks to talk to tech support when you know that you're more technical than they are. When I receive the card... will give Apple a call and see if there's any useful info on the battery... hopefully we'll hear something before.

[Transeau]

DO NOT BUY AN APPLE MAC PRO RAID CARD

This card is being returned Monday morning.
According to the Product Specialist, the battery takes 7 days to charge.

Every 30 days days the card will recondition the battery. A recondition cycle is draining the battery for 24 hours, then charging it for 7 days.

ANY time the battery is not fully charged, the write cache is disabled.

SO, 8 days EACH MONTH the system will run slow.

This is the single worst RAID controller that I have ever worked with.

[hayduke]

WTF? Christ. That's crazy. How can that be?!? This can't be a mega mA•H battery. What a crazy charge/conditioning scheme. Again, WTF? So will you try another non-Apple card? Keep us posted.

[Cromulent]

That sounds pretty poor. Surely that can't be the case. I have seen no mention of any performance related issues on the Xserve mailing list.

[Transeau]

WTF? Christ. That's crazy. How can that be?!? This can't be a mega mA•H battery. What a crazy charge/conditioning scheme. Again, WTF? So will you try another non-Apple card? Keep us posted.

My feelings exactly. I just don't understand it. The engineer reported back to the tech that the battery is trickle-Charge only. But being only 3.6v and 900mAh, it shouldn't take more than about 6~8 hours.

I'm a bit stressed about what I'm going to do. I want internal RAID-5, so this is currently the only solution. After reading the documentation, it states that the recondition time every 3 months, not 30 days. I think I'm going to give it the 7 days before returning it.

I'm going to try and force a recondition... more later.

[trancepriest]

DO NOT BUY AN APPLE MAC PRO RAID CARD

This card is being returned Monday morning.
According to the Product Specialist, the battery takes 7 days to charge.


Now that is absurd. I can't believe that's the case. The Product Specialist must have been giving you some ridiculous time overhead.

[Transeau]

Now that is absurd. I can't believe that's the case. The Product Specialist must have been giving you some ridiculous time overhead.

It doesn't appear to be the case. The engineering documentation states 7 days.
I'm just under 36 hours now. That's one slow trickle charge.

[MacCoaster]

To those who already have the RAID card, can you clarify something for me? On Apple's website they advertise RAID 0+1, but I've read 1+0 on this thread. Can anyone confirm the RAID card does both 0+1 and 1+0, because even though they're similar, I'm collecting that 1+0 is better.

Thanks.

[Transeau]

It's the same basic thing. 4 drives, mirrored and stripped. Just depends on if you are striping or mirroring first. To be completely correct, this card only does 0+1

[hayduke]

I never thought about 0+1 vs 1+0 before...I wasn't paying careful enough attention to make a distinction. From:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

I found:

* RAID 0+1: striped sets in a mirrored set (minimum 4 disks; even number of disks) provides fault tolerance and improved performance but increases complexity. The key difference from RAID 1+0 is that RAID 0+1 creates a second striped set to mirror a primary striped set. The array continues to operate with one or more drives failed in the same mirror set, but if two or more drives fail on different sides of the mirroring, the data on the RAID system is lost.

* RAID 1+0: mirrored sets in a striped set (minimum 4 disks; even number of disks) provides fault tolerance and improved performance but increases complexity. The key difference from RAID 0+1 is that RAID 1+0 creates a striped set from a series of mirrored drives. In a failed disk situation RAID 1+0 performs better and is more fault tolerant than RAID 0+1. The array can sustain multiple drive losses as long as no two drives lost comprise a single pair of one mirror.

[termina3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

I found:

* RAID 0+1: striped sets in a mirrored set (minimum 4 disks; even number of disks) provides fault tolerance and improved performance but increases complexity. The key difference from RAID 1+0 is that RAID 0+1 creates a second striped set to mirror a primary striped set. The array continues to operate with one or more drives failed in the same mirror set, but if two or more drives fail on different sides of the mirroring, the data on the RAID system is lost.

* RAID 1+0: mirrored sets in a striped set (minimum 4 disks; even number of disks) provides fault tolerance and improved performance but increases complexity. The key difference from RAID 0+1 is that RAID 1+0 creates a striped set from a series of mirrored drives. In a failed disk situation RAID 1+0 performs better and is more fault tolerant than RAID 0+1. The array can sustain multiple drive losses as long as no two drives lost comprise a single pair of one mirror.

I had some problems understanding this–if anyone else is, this site (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/multXY-c.html) is helpful.

[trancepriest]

I had some problems understanding this–if anyone else is, this site (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/multXY-c.html) is helpful.

Great read. Thanks for the link made it all easy to comprehend.

[Transeau]

It's ALIVE! About 52 hours of charging! Going to try some better benchmarks later.
Holy Crap! It's FAST! Just normal usage is SOOO MUCH faster!

[scotty69]

According to the Product Specialist, the battery takes 7 days to charge.


That can't be right. Mine charged overnight.

[hayduke]

It's ALIVE! About 52 hours of charging! Going to try some better benchmarks later.
Holy Crap! It's FAST! Just normal usage is SOOO MUCH faster!

Good on you mate!

Scotty69? Any set-up tips or did it all go smoothly?

[Transeau]

That can't be right. Mine charged overnight.

WHAT? Wow, that's not fair.

[trancepriest]

It's ALIVE! About 52 hours of charging! Going to try some better benchmarks later.
Holy Crap! It's FAST! Just normal usage is SOOO MUCH faster!

Glad to hear this report and the report from scotty69 that his charged overnight. Now I'm obsessively tracking my package... departed Lewisberry, PA is all I'm getting... LOL. I hope this is one of those times that FedEx delivers early.. otherwise i'll have to wait until Wednesday.

[Transeau]

Update:

Confirmed - The controller supports SAS drives, however for that speed gain you will loose the ability to use the SMART function of the SATA drives. (No temp readings and not failure prediction)

Write Cache Tests - The benchmarks (xbench) about 10~25% higher than the non-cache tests. Overall system is VERY responsive, and appears quieter (nice use of cache)

I've reinstalled on a RAID-5 array now. The initialization is with the write cache on is about 3x faster than with it disabled, though it still looking like about 2 hours to complete. (it was 6~8 hours with the cache disabled)

[trancepriest]

Update:

Confirmed - The controller supports SAS drives, however for that speed gain you will loose the ability to use the SMART function of the SATA drives. (No temp readings and not failure prediction)

Thanks for the SAS tidbit. I wasn't too familiar with these type of SCSI drives before.. what SAS drive did you use to test with the RAID card? Now I'm interested in RAIDing with 4 SAS drives. I would really like to see the speed benchmark with 4 SAS drives in RAID 5 config. Do you have any experience with the Seagate Cheetah drives?

[Transeau]

Thanks for the SAS tidbit. I wasn't too familiar with these type of SCSI drives before.. what SAS drive did you use to test with the RAID card? Now I'm interested in RAIDing with 4 SAS drives. I would really like to see the speed benchmark with 4 SAS drives in RAID 5 config. Do you have any experience with the Seagate Cheetah drives?

The drive I tested with was a Western Digital, unknown model. Unfortunately, I need to wait a few weeks before my PayPal fund builds back up to afford any new toys, so I can't test any more than a single SAS drive. (The drive came out of a Dell workstation that I was working on)

Speed tests for the RAID-5 was good.. Scored 97.73.. Yes, it seems pretty low, but a 10k RPM 150GB Raptor only scores 77.64, So RAID-5 speed is very respectable. Personally, I'm staying with a 4-Drive Stripe for my box. No serious need for RAID-5 as I have two other backups... (Time Machine on an external, and an X-RAID ReadyNAS via Gigabit)

[trancepriest]

Speed tests for the RAID-5 was good.. Scored 97.73.. Yes, it seems pretty low, but a 10k RPM 150GB Raptor only scores 77.64, So RAID-5 speed is very respectable. Personally, I'm staying with a 4-Drive Stripe for my box. No serious need for RAID-5 as I have two other backups... (Time Machine on an external, and an X-RAID ReadyNAS via Gigabit)

On the RAID 5 speed tests were all 4 bays populated? Also what drives were you using?

[KevinPlusPlus]

Quick question - I want to be sure if I understand this correctly.

Is it true that once you install the RAID card, you're unable to use Boot Camp? Or are you just unable to use any RAID volumes within Boot Camp? (i.e. if you have Mac OS X on 2 RAID 1 drives and Windows on a regular HD you can still boot and use Windows).

I figured asking people who have it is going to be the most reliable source. :) Thanks in advance!

[Transeau]

On the RAID 5 speed tests were all 4 bays populated? Also what drives were you using?

Yes, I was using the same four Western Digital 160GB "RE16" Drives for the RAID-5 tests. (7200RPM, 160GB, 16MB Cache, Multidrive firmware)

[Transeau]

Quick question - I want to be sure if I understand this correctly.

Is it true that once you install the RAID card, you're unable to use Boot Camp? Or are you just unable to use any RAID volumes within Boot Camp? (i.e. if you have Mac OS X on 2 RAID 1 drives and Windows on a regular HD you can still boot and use Windows).

I figured asking people who have it is going to be the most reliable source. :) Thanks in advance!

That is correct, the controller provides no "INT13" boot support for Windows. Only chance is if Apple updates the firmware in the Mac Pro to support this old method of booting, or is Macrosloth updates Vista to correctly support EFI firmware.

You only true option for Bootcamp with the RAID Card is to run one of the onboard SATA ports to an external drive and use that for bootcamp.

[KevinPlusPlus]

That is correct, the controller provides no "INT13" boot support for Windows. Only chance is if Apple updates the firmware in the Mac Pro to support this old method of booting, or is Macrosloth updates Vista to correctly support EFI firmware.

You only true option for Bootcamp with the RAID Card is to run one of the onboard SATA ports to an external drive and use that for bootcamp.

Thanks so much for that answer, I truly appreciate it.

I should have included this in my first post, but I also assume that VMWare or Parallels still work fine with the RAID card since the Windows file system is just in one big file on OS X?

[trancepriest]

Yes, I was using the same four Western Digital 160GB "RE16" Drives for the RAID-5 tests. (7200RPM, 160GB, 16MB Cache, Multidrive firmware)

The RAID 5 speeds seem very disappointing. I was expecting at least 180MB/sec. I'm getting 209.9MB/sec on a 3 drive RAID 0 set. Seagate 7200 RPM 750GB SATA HD's. The test was conducted with the AJA System DiskWhackTest utilizing a 16GB file. How large was the file you were testing? I noticed that files less than 512mb have lower average write speeds. Even Apple's Mac Pro Expansion page was reporting 166MB/sec RAID 5 writes. With RAID 0 being 245MB/sec.

[Transeau]

The RAID 5 speeds seem very disappointing. I was expecting at least 180MB/sec. I'm getting 209.9MB/sec on a 3 drive RAID 0 set. Seagate 7200 RPM 750GB SATA HD's. The test was conducted with the AJA System DiskWhackTest utilizing a 16GB file. How large was the file you were testing? I noticed that files less than 512mb have lower average write speeds. Even Apple's Mac Pro Expansion page was reporting 166MB/sec RAID 5 writes. With RAID 0 being 245MB/sec.

Oh no.. Sorry! All of the results are Xbench Scores, not throughput!

The actual Speeds were very close to Apple's reports. I was getting 120MB~150MB write speeds and 150MB~200MB read speeds. The RAID-5 with 4x160's was faster than a stand-alone raptor. So, it's very respectable. The speeds are on par with the SATA RAID-5 offerings from Dell in the PowerEdge servers.

[trancepriest]

Oh no.. Sorry! All of the results are Xbench Scores, not throughput!

The actual Speeds were very close to Apple's reports. I was getting 120MB~150MB write speeds and 150MB~200MB read speeds. The RAID-5 with 4x160's was faster than a stand-alone raptor. So, it's very respectable. The speeds are on par with the SATA RAID-5 offerings from Dell in the PowerEdge servers.

Boy am I relieved now, thanks for the clarification :-). My card is arriving tomorrow... I love FedEx. They are delivering it one day earlier than expected. I will post throughput speeds on the current 4x SATA Seagate 750GB 7200RPM drives... model # ST3750640AS-RK. Will hopefully convince my partner to get some SAS drives too.

[trancepriest]

Transeau,

Can you inform me if the card is an X4 or X8 PCI Express lane. The utility should be in System/Library/CoreServices/Expansion slot Utility

I have an AJA Kona LHe PCI Express 4x card in the top slot currently (figure will move it to the third slot). Trying to figure out how I will configure the slots. So far its looking like X4, X4, X1 and X16.

[Transeau]

Transeau,

Can you inform me if the card is an X4 or X8 PCI Express lane. The utility should be in System/Library/CoreServices/Expansion slot Utility

I have an AJA Kona LHe PCI Express 4x card in the top slot currently (figure will move it to the third slot). Trying to figure out how I will configure the slots. So far its looking like X4, X4, X1 and X16.

The card has an x8 interface, so the proper configuration is x16/x1/x1/x8. However, if you are not doing 3D graphics, you will want to reconfigure the slots for x8/x8/x1/x8 (Config Option 3).

The RAID Card MUST be in slot 4. It's not an interface requirement, but a cable requirement. The iPass cable will NOT reach any other slot. So, you would move the AJA Kona LHe to slot 2, and have the video card reduces to x8. Still plenty of bandwidth for HD video, just not 3D games.

[trancepriest]

The card has an x8 interface, so the proper configuration is x16/x1/x1/x8. However, if you are not doing 3D graphics, you will want to reconfigure the slots for x8/x8/x1/x8 (Config Option 3).

The RAID Card MUST be in slot 4. It's not an interface requirement, but a cable requirement. The iPass cable will NOT reach any other slot. So, you would move the AJA Kona LHe to slot 2, and have the video card reduces to x8. Still plenty of bandwidth for HD video, just not 3D games.

Can you also check About This Mac... PCI Cards... Mac Pro RAId.. Link Width.. to confirm the X8 requirement. X8 seems excessive bandwidth for the card... 2000MBps. Even with 4 SAS drives the sustained mac throughput would be around 656MBps.

[Transeau]

Can you also check About This Mac... PCI Cards... Mac Pro RAId.. Link Width.. to confirm the X8 requirement. X8 seems excessive bandwidth for the card... 2000MBps. Even with 4 SAS drives the sustained mac throughput would be around 656MBps.

Apple RAID Card:

Name: pci106b,8a
Type: RAID Controller
Bus: PCI
Slot: Slot-4
Vendor ID: 0x106b
Device ID: 0x008a
Subsystem Vendor ID: 0x0004
Subsystem ID: 0x0000
Revision ID: 0x0064
Link Width: x8

It is a bit much, but remember it does have that 256M cache that can dump it's contents to the system that fast. You may want to try from benchmarks with it in x4 and x8 mode

[trancepriest]

It is a bit much, but remember it does have that 256M cache that can dump it's contents to the system that fast. You may want to try from benchmarks with it in x4 and x8 mode

Thanks for the info.. guess I will have to take away from the graphics card.... i kinda hate doing that.. but no other config solution.

[Transeau]

Okay, I think this is my last remaining major bitch about the card.

The box will no longer sleep. I'm hoping that this is fixed at some point.

[hayduke]

Okay, I think this is my last remaining major bitch about the card.

The box will no longer sleep. I'm hoping that this is fixed at some point.


Fug. Replace trailing consonant sounds as you see fit.

[trancepriest]

Installed the card... battery is charging... hopefully it will be done by tomorrow morning. It was such a pain to extend the cable.. I had to unscrew the SATA port to pull more of the cable out. Did you guys let it stay on the Leopard RAID utility screen... while charging? I have 2 systems so I didn't mind the down time... didn't want to go back in just to connect the iPass cable.

Install pics: http://tweetl.com/2g8

Okay, I think this is my last remaining major bitch about the card.

The box will no longer sleep. I'm hoping that this is fixed at some point.

I guess we are beta testers... hopefully firmware update will solve all problems.

[beanlee]

A side note that may be important to note for other memebers who are interested in the RAID card config and run boot camp:

I decided to buy my 1st MAC pro with Raid card on it. Turned out the windows xp sp2 CD did not recognize the hard drive. I hate apple did not warn RAID card not compatible with Boot camp and regret about it.

Could I add a 2nd SATA card and drive to run boot camp in this case?

Thanks

[Transeau]

A side note that may be important to note for other memebers who are interested in the RAID card config and run boot camp:

I decided to buy my 1st MAC pro with Raid card on it. Turned out the windows xp sp2 CD did not recognize the hard drive. I hate apple did not warn RAID card not compatible with Boot camp and regret about it.

Could I add a 2nd SATA card and drive to run boot camp in this case?

Thanks

Your best bet is to install an eSATA cable from NewerTech.
http://www.newertech.com/products/esata_cable.php

You can then use an external SATA drive for bootcamp.

[hayduke]

Your best bet is to install an eSATA cable from NewerTech.
http://www.newertech.com/products/esata_cable.php

You can then use an external SATA drive for bootcamp.

Cool. Looks like I'm $25 away from buying an eSATA enclosure.

[trancepriest]

It's 2:23 AM and the battery is charged. Took about 10 hours or less to charge. Sorry you had so much issues with yours Transeau. I hope its not a sign that you have a messed up battery.

On another note... I wasn't able to migrate any of my volumes to a new set. Before i had a single JBOD and 3 drive RAID 0. I was hoping to migrate the JBOD to a RAID 5 set. I'm in Disk Utility making a backup image of the JBOD which is my OS drive.

[trancepriest]

Per what Transeau reported on the slow initializing process: After you create the RAID SET you then have to Create a new Volume by formatting it and the initializing process starts after that. You have to do this for the system to recognize the drives. It seems like a process that will take all day on my 4x750GB drives. A thing I was disappointed by was the lack of available space... out of 2794.56 GB I only have 1.78 available on a RAID 5 set. I was hoping for around 2.25TB with about one drives space for parity... its definitely taking up about a TB for parity.

[termina3]

Before i had a single JBOD and 3 drive RAID 0. I was hoping to migrate the JBOD to a RAID 5 set.

So... your "Just a Bunch of Old Drives" is one drive?

[trancepriest]

So... your "Just a Bunch of Old Drives" is one drive?

Yes.

[trancepriest]

Took 13 hours to initialize 4 x 750GB drives.

[termina3]

Took 13 hours to initialize 4 x 750GB drives.

That seems long to me... I dunno much, though

Also interesting how it wouldn't let you migrate one drive right into a RAID 5... it seems like Apple has some bugs to work out here.

[trancepriest]

That seems long to me... I dunno much, though

Also interesting how it wouldn't let you migrate one drive right into a RAID 5... it seems like Apple has some bugs to work out here.

Apple only allows you to migrate a single-disk Enhanced JBOD RAID set. Basically a single drive that they configure with the RAID Card on their end if you purchase the BTO option.

http://images.apple.com/server/docs/RAID_Utility_User_Guide.pdf

As for the initializing time... I guess its normal after what Transeau reported on his 160GB drives taking 2 hours.

[trancepriest]

Further SAS controller proof.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2024/2028138052_92ecb5839c_o.png

[Transeau]

Per what Transeau reported on the slow initializing process: After you create the RAID SET you then have to Create a new Volume by formatting it and the initializing process starts after that. You have to do this for the system to recognize the drives. It seems like a process that will take all day on my 4x750GB drives. A thing I was disappointed by was the lack of available space... out of 2794.56 GB I only have 1.78 available on a RAID 5 set. I was hoping for around 2.25TB with about one drives space for parity... its definitely taking up about a TB for parity.

That's about right. You lose 1/3 of your total to the parity stripe.

[Transeau]

That seems long to me... I dunno much, though

Also interesting how it wouldn't let you migrate one drive right into a RAID 5... it seems like Apple has some bugs to work out here.
The time to migrate is normal for a controller without a "Fast Init" feature. Some controllers allow you to do the initialization in a very low priority, but that leaves the volume prone to errors for up to a week.

As for the migration, that's also normal. You can migrate a single volume PLUS 3 EMPTY drives to a RAID-5, but if there is anyone on the other 3, you are out of luck.

[trancepriest]

As for the migration, that's also normal. You can migrate a single volume PLUS 3 EMPTY drives to a RAID-5, but if there is anyone on the other 3, you are out of luck.

Also that first volume has to be a single-disk enhanced JBOD configured at the factory with a Mac PRO RAID Card BTO. I wasn't able to migrate my system drive. I had to do a disk image of my System HD in diskutil and then restore it on to the fresh RAID 5 volume.... luckily it worked... sometimes that's kind of tricky with diskutil.

[Transeau]

Also that first volume has to be a single-disk enhanced JBOD configured at the factory with a Mac PRO RAID Card BTO. I wasn't able to migrate my system drive.

No worries, it took less time to init the volume than it would have to migrate it :)

[trancepriest]

No worries, it took less time to init the volume than it would have to migrate it :)

LOL... I wonder what the migrate time would have been.. took me 13 hours to init it.

[Transeau]

LOL... I wonder what the migrate time would have been.. took me 13 hours to init it.

Well, you have to remember that migrating requires the system to resize the partition to jsut fit the data, create a new RAID volume, start moving the data, as it shrinks the old and expands the new. (Yes, that was WAY over simplified, but I didn't want to confuse the RAID newbies) :P

[forstle]

Oh man... I am so glad I found this thread, Lepoard was driving me nuts!

In any case, I am about 65% of the way through my Initialization that I started around 5:30PM (EST), it is now 8:50PM so it's been about 3h 20m so far... extrapolating out it should be done in about 2 more hours making for a total of 5-6 hours of initialization. I don't know if that's in-line with the post about 13 hours for the 4x750 system.

Of course, my battery is not charged... I am just going to wait the 2 more hours and see what happens.

MacPro 8-Core 3Ghz, 5GB RAM, 4x500GB, X1900XT.

[forstle]

Ok, so it all worked out I think. As of this morning my battery is charged so it took (worst case) less than 16 hours for it to charge for me. As for the initialization, I think it ended up being closer to 5 hours than 6 hours. I wasn't awake when it finished. Installing Leopard now.

[graphex]

Your best bet is to install an eSATA cable from NewerTech.
http://www.newertech.com/products/esata_cable.php

You can then use an external SATA drive for bootcamp.

Can anyone confirm that this works to install an external drive for boot camp while using a RAID card for OSX?

I thought I read elsewhere that the Windows can't see drives connected to those ODD ports, but OS X can. I'm thinking of getting one of the new Penryn 8-cores with a BTO RAID card and the SAS drives, but only if I can maintain the boot camp option. Still haven't heard a reliable report of ANYONE able to use boot camp with the RAID card plugged in to the iPass cable.

[MrPDaddyHimself]

Question? I ordered a RAID card in my CTO Mac Pro along with drives. I know...I know...I could get drives cheaper online...blah..blah...blah...But I want to make sure since I'm investing so much into my source of income so to speak that everything is covered via warranty, etc. I had the cash and had been waiting over a year for this sucker. An extra $600 was worth it to me. So, with that said, won't the RAID card come installed or will I have to go through everything this guy has? Anyone know? Thanks.

[vdrummer]

Question? I ordered a RAID card in my CTO Mac Pro along with drives. I know...I know...I could get drives cheaper online...blah..blah...blah...But I want to make sure since I'm investing so much into my source of income so to speak that everything is covered via warranty, etc. I had the cash and had been waiting over a year for this sucker. An extra $600 was worth it to me. So, with that said, won't the RAID card come installed or will I have to go through everything this guy has? Anyone know? Thanks.

You'll probably have to go through much of it - there doesn't appear any options upon ordering for specifying which RAID setup is installed on the drives, so I'd guess, for example, that you'd have to go through all the RAID 5 setup if you wanted RAID 5. Check the manual:

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/RAID_Utility_User_Guide.pdf

[Maddler]

I too would like to know if Windows via Bootcamp/Parallels/Fusion can be run off of a RAID-5 partition on Apple's hardware RAID card.

I also have an X-Serve RAID connected via fibre channel. Can anyone tell me if Windows via Bootcamp can access an X-Serve RAID array? It's setup as RAID-50.

[Audiocream]

Hey guys with the raid card!
Please tell me,
is noise an issue with SAS? I mean aren´t the SAS HDs not very noisy?
I installed a 2,5" SAS HD in a PC Desktop and it sounded like a small motorbycicle do me.
I am thinking of using a Mac Pro with the RAID card for a audio/video cut environment but the machine has to be silent.
I already know the volume level of the Mac Pros and they are very quiet. So i do not want do destroy the machine´s quietness with fast but loud SAS Drives, can anyone help me out with this?

Thanks!

[mission75]

Can anyone confirm that this works to install an external drive for boot camp while using a RAID card for OSX?

I thought I read elsewhere that the Windows can't see drives connected to those ODD ports, but OS X can. I'm thinking of getting one of the new Penryn 8-cores with a BTO RAID card and the SAS drives, but only if I can maintain the boot camp option. Still haven't heard a reliable report of ANYONE able to use boot camp with the RAID card plugged in to the iPass cable.

you cant with windows but you can with a sata controller. I'm booting 2 windows OS right now with a FirmTek 2 slot sata controller. I didn't know it was possible. I found just by trying it. Windows is very hardware oriented to work with as many different types of computers so it will freak out if you try to boot from a firewire. I too want to boot windows via a raid card, but have no idea if you can.

[radarseven]

Any users (especially @Transeu) have any experience with the recondition/recharge cycle? Which is accurate, recondtion/recharge every 30 days or 3 months?

I'm considering the RAID card in a new BTO Mac Pro, specifically for RAID5. This machine won't be a server, but a high-powered workstation, so losing 8 days of work every 30 days seems pretty ridiculous to me.

It sounds like the initial charge cycle takes anywhere from 10 hours all the way up to 7 days. I'm just curious if anyone has experience with the recharges and how it affects performance.

P.S. Has there been a firmware fix for the deep sleep problem with this card?

Thanks

[Rick Here]

I haven't seen this on my machine. I leave it on over night quite often but have not experienced or noticed any performance issues related to battery conditioning since last October. :)

[mac666er]

@mission75:


you cant with windows but you can with a sata controller. I'm booting 2 windows OS right now with a FirmTek 2 slot sata controller. I didn't know it was possible. I found just by trying it. Windows is very hardware oriented to work with as many different types of computers so it will freak out if you try to boot from a firewire. I too want to boot windows via a raid card, but have no idea if you can.

mission,

Does that mean that you have a RAID card and a sata controller and that furthermore, you can boot a bootcamp drive from the second controller? What model of sata card do you have?

Thanks,

mac

[mikekim75]

Heres the lint to the card I have and the storage box. I dont have a raid card and I dont have a raid yet, but it helps alot to make a raid with it.
http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2se2-e
http://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/

[mac666er]

Heres the lint to the card I have and the storage box. I dont have a raid card and I dont have a raid yet, but it helps alot to make a raid with it.
http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2se2-e
http://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/

Thanks mikekim, can you run bootcamp on a hard disk connected to your card?

I am interested because mission suggested that you could have one of these cards to have a bootcamp volume.

This would be very sweet...

mac

[mission75]

Thanks mikekim, can you run bootcamp on a hard disk connected to your card?

I am interested because mission suggested that you could have one of these cards to have a bootcamp volume.

This would be very sweet...

mac

Yes thats what I'm doing now. Also what I do is install the games on the opposite drive of the windows OS that way it caches to both drives in the esata storage box and that data transfer is faster especially when a games loads. By the way I am mission, I just have so many computers that I logged in with 2 different IDs for convenience

[scottydawg]

I have a Mac Pro on the way with RAID and SAS drives so I would like to run Bootcamp the way you have mentioned.
I had heard the Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P (http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempo_sata_e4p.html) is not a card you can boot from, does anyone know if this is true? Trying to decide if I should install the Tempo I have sitting here or sell it and get the Firmtek.

[mac666er]

Sweet.

I guess I should go back to the original topic of the thread.

I have a mac pro with a RAID card and 4 SATA drives and was looking for a bootcamp solution. I have all my bays used up (the 4 internal ones and the two 5 1/4 front ones) and really was looking for an external alternative to do it.

Sadly after installing the card and going through the ipass cable hassle I find out to my dismay that bootcamp doesn't work on an external drive :-(

So your solution seems like a nice alternative, I think I will give it a shot this month.

mac

[scottydawg]

I decided to write Firmtek to see if there would be any issue booting with their card. Here is the reply:
Dear Scott,
Thank you for contacting FirmTek. The SeriTek/2SE2-E can be used for additional storage
with Mac OS X or BootCamp. However, the SeriTek/2SE2-E is not bootable with either OS on
the Mac Pro.

http://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/sata2es2e.html (http://webmail.aceplumbing.com/horde/util/go.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffirmtek.stores.yahoo.net%2Fsata2es2e.html&Horde=c8db7e0d4978be533bd865577e628539)

The Mac Pro has four internal hard drive bays that can be used for boot drives with Mac OS X
or BootCamp. If you want to use BootCamp be sure NOT to order Apples RAID card option as
this feature removes the ability to use BootCamp with the Mac Pro.

[mac666er]

I decided to write Firmtek to see if there would be any issue booting with their card. Here is the reply:

Hmmm but I thought mission could BOOT from an external windows disk, that is, that he installed a windows partition in an eSATA (external) drive using the card, and that he could select it to boot from it while holding the option key at startup.

Is this not the case?

mac

[mikekim75]

Hmmm but I thought mission could BOOT from an external windows disk, that is, that he installed a windows partition in an eSATA (external) drive using the card, and that he could select it to boot from it while holding the option key at startup.

Is this not the case?

mac
Not with the option key, select the disk in system preferences under start up disk, it wont show up with option key (aka) firmware screen, I'm telling the truth. I'll prove it if you want me too. I found out by accident, Sorry I know this thread is about the raid card but we got carried away hear. BOOTCAMP, WINDOWS WILL BOOT WITH FIRMTEK eSATA, You can get the 4 port and will boot mac OS X too, but I havent got that one I have the 2 port

[scottydawg]

Hey Mike,
Your making me feel better already :D .
So if you have a few minutes in the next week or so could you explain step by step for a total Mac Dummy (I am a PC guy that is making the move) how to set this up and do this thing? Very appreciated in advance.

[mikekim75]

Hey Mike,
Your making me feel better already :D .
So if you have a few minutes in the next week or so could you explain step by step for a total Mac Dummy (I am a PC guy that is making the move) how to set this up and do this thing? Very appreciated in advance.

Ok I can give you pics of the whole thing. And maybe I'll show you windows running COD4 with a 8800gtx to, yes thats right GTX baby

[mikekim75]

Hey Mike,
Your making me feel better already :D .
So if you have a few minutes in the next week or so could you explain step by step for a total Mac Dummy (I am a PC guy that is making the move) how to set this up and do this thing? Very appreciated in advance.

Ok Later I'll post Vista Booted to it, I have to change cards because the new mac pro wont boot windows with the old mac pro ATi card in for some reason. Weird I know.

[scottydawg]

This is really cool (and fun to see). Thanks for showing what ya got cookin'. I'm sure I'll have questions about how to get boot camp on the eSATA disk and how to make it all work at boot up but since I don't get the new MP for two weeks there's time for an education :)

[mikekim75]

This is really cool (and fun to see). Thanks for showing what ya got cookin'. I'm sure I'll have questions about how to get boot camp on the eSATA disk and how to make it all work at boot up but since I don't get the new MP for two weeks there's time for an education :)

Nothing to learn really, but I suggest installing vista with the hard drive in the mac first, then just throw it in the FirmTek and select windows as the start up disk in system preferences, don't hold the option key on boot it wont show up, just let it boot. Vista will say it found new hardware and install the driver all by itself. It will reboot and your done!

[scottydawg]

Nothing to learn really, but I suggest installing vista with the hard drive in the mac first, then just throw it in the FirmTek and select windows as the start up disk in system preferences, don't hold the option key on boot it wont show up, just let it boot. Vista will say it found new hardware and install the driver all by itself. It will reboot and your done!
Ahhh here's where I will have a problem, since I have a RAID card and SAS drives, I won't be able to put the drive in the Mac first. I might be able to find another Mac to do it on. I'm going to see what my options are when I try next week and let you know (I'm sure you'll be holding your breath LOL). Seriously, thanks for the explanation!

[mac666er]

Thanks for the pictures! That is great info! It really does seem like the only way to go if you want boot camp with a RAID card installed.

Ahhh here's where I will have a problem, since I have a RAID card and SAS drives, I won't be able to put the drive in the Mac first. I might be able to find another Mac to do it on. I'm going to see what my options are when I try next week and let you know (I'm sure you'll be holding your breath LOL). Seriously, thanks for the explanation!

hmmmmm I am also on the same boat. Last time I tried to install bootcamp to an external firewire hard drive it gave me an error that it just wasn't possible by the installer.

Now, the interesting part is that a firewire drive of course can't be put inside a mac, well not without opening the enclusure anyway... It seems we will have to find a way to install boot camp into the drive before putting it into the esata enclosure. The only way obivous to me to do this would be to uninstall the RAID card and do that inside the mac, to later reinstall the RAID card. But to be honest, I would rather look at other options than uninstalling the ipass cable to later install it again, it gave me too many headaches...

mac

[mikekim75]

I know very little about the raid card since I dont have one but why cant you remove one hard drive temporarily? Also, I have to know, Is your raid card with sas drives amazing in performance? Like in regular stuff you know booting and opening apps copying and moving. Is it worth it?

[mac666er]

I know very little about the raid card since I dont have one but why cant you remove one hard drive temporarily? Also, I have to know, Is your raid card with sas drives amazing in performance? Like in regular stuff you know booting and opening apps copying and moving. Is it worth it?

Hmmmm well, I have a RAID 5 with 4 drives setup, which means I can take one out and still run the RAID (degraded). I didn't attempt this because I know bootcamp will not boot with a drive attached to this card.... However I don't know if it is possible to install boot camp in a drive, just to later unplug it and then plug it in to an eSATA controller.... hmmmm maybe it is worth a try.

As for RAID performance, I didn't install SAS drives, but rather 750GB SATA ones.


I do have some complains:


This has been said before, the card takes around a day to charge up. I went on vacation and left it off but plugged in and it took a whole day to charge up again once it booted.

Also, you can put the Mac pro to sleep, the RAID just doesn't turn off... at all. Which I guess is ok, bootup time is very little anyway.

The major one is bootcamp. You pretty much kiss goodbye bootcamp functionality (Or at least until I try your set up). But this is more related to bootcamp rather than the RAID card, because I wouldn't want bootcamp drives connected to my RAID anyway. My original idea was to have bootcamp on an external drive... but you know how that went. A mac Pro is an excellent windows machine! I had Windows XP 64 installed before I installed the RAID card and it was great!



Now the sweet stuff:


Performance is great, I boot from the RAID and it is definitely faster than before (had a 750GB Hitachi drive), it is around 2 to 3 times faster to boot and definitely much less noisy (because of activity AND new drives.. see below). Also, I have a photoshop scratch disk setup in the RAID and I can work on 4k x 4k images with 3 or 4 other major apps open with NO lags (but then again this also because of RAM installed).

I bought server-grade drives and they are ultra-quiet! no problem in there!

With a RAID 5 setup one of your drives can go up in flames and you still can keep on truckin': same space available, all your files there, although a little slower, but hey, much better than losing a volume all of a sudden!

But where this really shines is in HD Quicktime playback. Can work on 1920 x 1080 movies and the system doesn't sweat. This is still with some highly compressed videos, but there are some video compression cards out there that will let you increase quality up to broadcasting standards... and that is very sweet. I still have to see any experiences with SAS drives, but that would be definitely faster than my setup (and noisier).



Overall, a great experience! But wouldn't recommend it for other than video editing. I don't think it is worth it if you only do Word docs, mail and web-surfing. Even if you do photo editing, I think you would be served better off by more RAM than a RAID. Also, even if you have a lot of apps open, you would be better off if you have more RAM. But then again, that is just my opinion.

mac, happy RAID card owner

[scottydawg]

I know very little about the raid card since I dont have one but why cant you remove one hard drive temporarily? Also, I have to know, Is your raid card with sas drives amazing in performance? Like in regular stuff you know booting and opening apps copying and moving. Is it worth it?
You can't mix SAS and SATA drives with the RAID card so I won't be able to pull one drive to set up the SATA drive. :(
on the performance question.... I don't have my Mac Pro yet (I ordered Jan 18th) but I will give a detailed report when it arrives.

[mariconson]

i just got my new mac pro and i wanted to do RAID 5 with 4 750gb hard drives. Im new to RAID and i want to make sure i dont screw anything up. Luckly the raid card came installed. It shows as the RAID card is charged, what should i do next?
Remove the original 320gb hard drive and put the 4 new 750gb?

[kakace]

I'm having troubles with the Apple Pro RAID card and WD Caviar RE2 (WD7500AYYS). I just can't initialize any kind of RAID with these HDD - Either RAID utility reports an error (disk about to fail, etc), either the disk is reported as removed after a short while then the corresponding bay is said empty. I've tried with three different disks to no avail (the fourth being DOA). All three behave the same.
By now, I'm stuck with the 320 Gb drive that shipped with the machine (Seagate), and because that's the only drive I have at hand, I can't say whether the problem is with the RAID card that is unable to initialize them for some reason, or the WD HDD (as a side note, two of them arrived with a noticeable bump on the enclosure, including the DOA one, so maybe the other two are not healthy either).

Any experience with the same combination is welcomed, as are advices on what to buy next to be on a safe path.
Thank you.

[forstle]

Remove the original 320gb hard drive and put the 4 new 750gb?

That is what I would do and then just put the Leopard CD in and reinstall. It's going to take a while though for the drives to get "initialized" 4x750 should take, I imagine over 1/2 a day to complete.

[kakace]

I'm having troubles with the Apple Pro RAID card and WD Caviar RE2 (WD7500AYYS). (...)
Update -
I've bought another disk yesterday (WD Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS), and I experienced the very same troubles. RAID Utility was still marking the disk as Enhanced JBOD for more than 6 hours when I decided to restart. No RAID created, no volume to format, nothing. That disk no longer appear, in any bay I tried.
I finally pulled the RAID card and reconnected the iPass connector to the motherboard. Out of five WD drives, only two WD7500AYYS still appear in disk utility. Any attempt to erase them leads disk utility to keep "writing the partition map" for ever. In short, all five WD drives appear to be dead.

I don't know how to bring them back online, if that is even possible. I'm starting to think the RAID card is actually killing them for some reason. The Seagate that shipped with the MP appears to work fine though. But I didn't try to format it then mark it for enhanced JBOD again. So there's either something wrong in how the RAID card deal with WD drives (killing them in the process), or the RAID card itself is broken and I'm kind of lucky the Seagate drive works...

Guess it's time to call AppleCare :mad:

[ManWithAPlan]

Hmmmm well, I have a RAID 5 with 4 drives setup, which means I can take one out and still run the RAID (degraded). I didn't attempt this because I know bootcamp will not boot with a drive attached to this card.... However I don't know if it is possible to install boot camp in a drive, just to later unplug it and then plug it in to an eSATA controller.... hmmmm maybe it is worth a try.

As for RAID performance, I didn't install SAS drives, but rather 750GB SATA ones.


I do have some complains:


This has been said before, the card takes around a day to charge up. I went on vacation and left it off but plugged in and it took a whole day to charge up again once it booted.

Also, you can put the Mac pro to sleep, the RAID just doesn't turn off... at all. Which I guess is ok, bootup time is very little anyway.

The major one is bootcamp. You pretty much kiss goodbye bootcamp functionality (Or at least until I try your set up). But this is more related to bootcamp rather than the RAID card, because I wouldn't want bootcamp drives connected to my RAID anyway. My original idea was to have bootcamp on an external drive... but you know how that went. A mac Pro is an excellent windows machine! I had Windows XP 64 installed before I installed the RAID card and it was great!



Now the sweet stuff:


Performance is great, I boot from the RAID and it is definitely faster than before (had a 750GB Hitachi drive), it is around 2 to 3 times faster to boot and definitely much less noisy (because of activity AND new drives.. see below). Also, I have a photoshop scratch disk setup in the RAID and I can work on 4k x 4k images with 3 or 4 other major apps open with NO lags (but then again this also because of RAM installed).

I bought server-grade drives and they are ultra-quiet! no problem in there!

With a RAID 5 setup one of your drives can go up in flames and you still can keep on truckin': same space available, all your files there, although a little slower, but hey, much better than losing a volume all of a sudden!

But where this really shines is in HD Quicktime playback. Can work on 1920 x 1080 movies and the system doesn't sweat. This is still with some highly compressed videos, but there are some video compression cards out there that will let you increase quality up to broadcasting standards... and that is very sweet. I still have to see any experiences with SAS drives, but that would be definitely faster than my setup (and noisier).



Overall, a great experience! But wouldn't recommend it for other than video editing. I don't think it is worth it if you only do Word docs, mail and web-surfing. Even if you do photo editing, I think you would be served better off by more RAM than a RAID. Also, even if you have a lot of apps open, you would be better off if you have more RAM. But then again, that is just my opinion.

mac, happy RAID card owner

mac,

Thanks for this info, very helpful. I am waiting for my new MP to arrive (Friday hopefully!). It will have OSX Server and the Mac RAID card with 4x1TB drives. Supposedly, apple ships the OS installed on Drive 1 and all drives are JBOD initially. I am leaning toward config'ing all 4 drives in a RAID5 for the reasons you mention. Can I ask, did you just set up one massive RAID5 volume, or did you create separate volumes for OS/apps, scratch, backup, etc.? Any advice you can give, let me know. I obviously know about the initial battery charge thing and then the coversion of 4TB of drive space in JBOD to RAID5 will likely take a LONG time, but that's fine. Just anything you can think of, let me know.

I truly appreciate it....let's keep this thread going with each of our various experiences with RAID, because there is a dirth of info out there right now on this.

Cheers!
Brian

[mac666er]

I'm having troubles with the Apple Pro RAID card and WD Caviar RE2 (WD7500AYYS). I just can't initialize any kind of RAID with these HDD - Either RAID utility reports an error (disk about to fail, etc), either the disk is reported as removed after a short while then the corresponding bay is said empty. I've tried with three different disks to no avail (the fourth being DOA). All three behave the same.
By now, I'm stuck with the 320 Gb drive that shipped with the machine (Seagate), and because that's the only drive I have at hand, I can't say whether the problem is with the RAID card that is unable to initialize them for some reason, or the WD HDD (as a side note, two of them arrived with a noticeable bump on the enclosure, including the DOA one, so maybe the other two are not healthy either).

Any experience with the same combination is welcomed, as are advices on what to buy next to be on a safe path.
Thank you.

Hmmmmm I should have replied earlier. When I installed the RAID card I bought 3 additional 750GB WD caviar drives, just the ones you bought. And put them together with the hitachi drive that came with my mac (also 750 GB). Please note that this is not recommended in general, why? because I bought three drives from the same brand and unless you are really lucky you will receive them all from the same batch (i.e. drives that were manufactured closely together, same factory, same assembly line, etc.) the problem with this is that if a drive fails because of a manufacturing defect what do you think your chances are that the other drives will not fail? hmmm not very high. I have read in the Apple support web pages that actually when you buy the drives from apple to set them up as a RAID when you buy a mac pro from them they make sure that the drives are from different batches. I can't vouch for this, but it sounds reasonable given the prices they charge for drives and memory.

I copied all my files into an external firewire drive and then nuked my system (I formatted all drives and set them up as RAID 5). This way I didn't have to wait for the transition from JBOD and formatting is relatively fast (less than an hour).

However, after 2 weeks or so TWO of my drives started showing funny behavior. One of them started making noises, like it was spinning out of control, loud enough that you couldn't sleep in the same room even if the mac pro wasn't doing anything but spinning the drives. :(

The other problem is that, guess what? a drive would suddenly disappear from the RAID, like it was just not installed. Then for a day or so the RAID would run degraded and after a while recognize the drive and go back to normal.

So after a month I decided to upgrade the drives to server class ( also Western digital but server class model) and problems went away. (this time I did order from different vendors :-)

Quite frankly, I believe the problem is your drives and not the card, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see ANY drives. If you can, exchange the hard drives for another brand or at least to server quality.

mac

[valdore]

What's the difference between a server quality drive and a normal drive?

[mac666er]

mac,

Thanks for this info, very helpful. I am waiting for my new MP to arrive (Friday hopefully!). It will have OSX Server and the Mac RAID card with 4x1TB drives. Supposedly, apple ships the OS installed on Drive 1 and all drives are JBOD initially. I am leaning toward config'ing all 4 drives in a RAID5 for the reasons you mention. Can I ask, did you just set up one massive RAID5 volume, or did you create separate volumes for OS/apps, scratch, backup, etc.? Any advice you can give, let me know. I obviously know about the initial battery charge thing and then the coversion of 4TB of drive space in JBOD to RAID5 will likely take a LONG time, but that's fine. Just anything you can think of, let me know.

I truly appreciate it....let's keep this thread going with each of our various experiences with RAID, because there is a dirth of info out there right now on this.

Cheers!
Brian

Hi Brian,

I just have one massive RAID 5 volume :-D I run all scratch files in this volume. I currently have a backup of the most critical files to 3 different places, yeah I know, but you can't be too paranoid about backing up data. Curiously enough, none of this is in my RAID. In any case, if a hard disk fails I am covered since it is RAID 5 and you can still work while waiting for a spare in the mail.

I do have one problem with my RAID though, and that is .mac idisk syncing. I back up some of my files to my idisk and syncing ALWAYS hangs. I don't know why is this, but I shut down the mac and when I restart, the idisk shows my files and when I log in to my idisk from a different machine the files are readable, so... I don't know what happens.

Other than that, I really have no complains, other than probably you will waste space if you have a lot of small files, say hundreds of thousands of text documents, like for example if you are serving a huge website or a large text library of some kind. This is because of the allocation of the sectors in the drives, a specific file is allotted a minimum byte amount, hence if your text files are smaller than this you are wasting space.

Another thing to consider would be disk fragmentation. Before Tiger I read that it was an issue, and that if you had a RAID you had to defragment your disk once in a while. In any case, I don't think the RAID card has a utility that does this and I haven't read anywhere if this is a serious issue. Back when I got my first RAID I had to defrag it constantly and this was the case on systems 7, 8 , 9 and X up to 10.2, but I haven't seen anything on Leopard...

From what I read on this thread, I would nuke the system that Apple sends, reformat all the drives to RAID 5 and then partition the RAID to your liking, which I think the best is one partition anyway. This approach seems the faster setting up procedure from what I have read. I definitely did not spend as much time as the original poster spent when setting up the card (I didn't migrate my drives, I formatted them).

Setting up one partition seems the safest and speediest alternative. Because if you set up a RAID with 2 drives you are limited to RAID 1 (mirroring) or RAID 0 (stripping) the first one gives half the capacity with added piece of mind while the second one gives you added speed at the expense of a drive failure will bring your whole partition down. RAID 5 gives you both, but you need at least 3 drives, and if you just set up 3 drives, that means that you leave one standalone, which seems like a waste anyway, that is why I decided to use all of them as RAID5.

In any case, I have yet to read anywhere that setting up a separate drive for scratch, applications, etc gives added advantages. I haven't seen it, but maybe somebody can share his/her experiences on this.

Also, video professionals back up their RAIDs constantly to an external RAID. In an ideal world you should back up your RAID constantly to another device. Since there are no 4 TB drives yet, that means another RAID :-P

Good luck setting up the mac pro of your dreams!

mac

[mac666er]

What's the difference between a server quality drive and a normal drive?

There are two versions, one consumer and one server "grade":

consumer one:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western%20Digital/WD7500AAKS/

server grade one:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western%20Digital/WD7500AYYS/

For starters the server one has 2 extra years of warranty and a published mean time before failure (that is, on average, how many hours it takes for this drive to fail) but I couldn't find the rate on the consumer one, I would presume it is lower. And the seek times on the second one are lower! (But quite honestly I don't know if 1.3 ms of access time make a difference... :-P) But I can tell you that the server class drive, at least in my case, is certainly quieter.

mac

[kakace]

Quite frankly, I believe the problem is your drives and not the card, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see ANY drives. If you can, exchange the hard drives for another brand or at least to server quality.
Well... The four drives I mentionned are WD Caviar RE2 Raid Edition (WD7500AYYS), and they all fail no matter what. One was DOA, another one died soon after (no longer recognized, even when I reconnect the iPass cable to the motherboard). The last two cause diskutil to fail with an error code -9944 while attempting to format them. The drives then start clicking for ever (sounding like a cricket or something). The same thing occur when I try to build a RAID with them (even a straighforward enhanced JBOD). No RAID is ever built as RAID utility spins the candybar for ever.
In short, they're all server grade, brand new, and just plain dead. As is the fifth one (customer grade, SE16) bought elsewhere. It's no longer listed in the devices list too (/dev/disk*).

The fact that you have the same drives up and running allow me to discard the assumption by which there could be an incompatibility between the card and the drives. I'm left with two : a somewhat faulty RAID card is killing them for some reason, or all WD drives were damagaged/bad.
I want to believe the later is true as a tribute to Murphy's law :o

[ManWithAPlan]

Hi Brian,

I just have one massive RAID 5 volume :-D I run all scratch files in this volume. I currently have a backup of the most critical files to 3 different places, yeah I know, but you can't be too paranoid about backing up data. Curiously enough, none of this is in my RAID. In any case, if a hard disk fails I am covered since it is RAID 5 and you can still work while waiting for a spare in the mail.

I do have one problem with my RAID though, and that is .mac idisk syncing. I back up some of my files to my idisk and syncing ALWAYS hangs. I don't know why is this, but I shut down the mac and when I restart, the idisk shows my files and when I log in to my idisk from a different machine the files are readable, so... I don't know what happens.

Other than that, I really have no complains, other than probably you will waste space if you have a lot of small files, say hundreds of thousands of text documents, like for example if you are serving a huge website or a large text library of some kind. This is because of the allocation of the sectors in the drives, a specific file is allotted a minimum byte amount, hence if your text files are smaller than this you are wasting space.

Another thing to consider would be disk fragmentation. Before Tiger I read that it was an issue, and that if you had a RAID you had to defragment your disk once in a while. In any case, I don't think the RAID card has a utility that does this and I haven't read anywhere if this is a serious issue. Back when I got my first RAID I had to defrag it constantly and this was the case on systems 7, 8 , 9 and X up to 10.2, but I haven't seen anything on Leopard...

From what I read on this thread, I would nuke the system that Apple sends, reformat all the drives to RAID 5 and then partition the RAID to your liking, which I think the best is one partition anyway. This approach seems the faster setting up procedure from what I have read. I definitely did not spend as much time as the original poster spent when setting up the card (I didn't migrate my drives, I formatted them).

Setting up one partition seems the safest and speediest alternative. Because if you set up a RAID with 2 drives you are limited to RAID 1 (mirroring) or RAID 0 (stripping) the first one gives half the capacity with added piece of mind while the second one gives you added speed at the expense of a drive failure will bring your whole partition down. RAID 5 gives you both, but you need at least 3 drives, and if you just set up 3 drives, that means that you leave one standalone, which seems like a waste anyway, that is why I decided to use all of them as RAID5.

In any case, I have yet to read anywhere that setting up a separate drive for scratch, applications, etc gives added advantages. I haven't seen it, but maybe somebody can share his/her experiences on this.

Also, video professionals back up their RAIDs constantly to an external RAID. In an ideal world you should back up your RAID constantly to another device. Since there are no 4 TB drives yet, that means another RAID :-P

Good luck setting up the mac pro of your dreams!

mac

Thanks mac, much appreciated! I will likely do the same thing I guess, just 1 massive RAID5 volume. Will really enjoy being able to lose a drive, and still keep on ticking. I do indeed have several large external drives for backups, and am well-versed in preserving my data that way as well.

She arrives on Friday, I have confirmed with FedEx, so I wait impatiently here! I think maybe you're right about just wiping the drives, and formatting from scratch in a RAID5, then installing Leopard Server on that, followed by my app's, etc. Then I should be off and running! I'll let you all know how I make out.

Thanks again,
Brian

[louden]

I read through this thread - and see that Windows won't work with the RAID card - but what if you only set up RAID with say, three drives, and leave the fourth unraided? Can you then install Windows via bootcamp on that unraided drive? Or is the issue that once the RAID card is installed, Windows won't see it?

It seems like three disks on RAID 5 could be a good choice as you get less of a capacity penalty as you would with four...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306212

[scottydawg]

I read through this thread - and see that Windows won't work with the RAID card - but what if you only set up RAID with say, three drives, and leave the fourth unraided? Can you then install Windows via bootcamp on that unraided drive? Or is the issue that once the RAID card is installed, Windows won't see it?

It seems like three disks on RAID 5 could be a good choice as you get less of a capacity penalty as you would with four...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306212

You can't run Windows on Boot Camp if you have the RAID card.

[ManWithAPlan]

Hi Brian,
Another thing to consider would be disk fragmentation. Before Tiger I read that it was an issue, and that if you had a RAID you had to defragment your disk once in a while. In any case, I don't think the RAID card has a utility that does this and I haven't read anywhere if this is a serious issue. Back when I got my first RAID I had to defrag it constantly and this was the case on systems 7, 8 , 9 and X up to 10.2, but I haven't seen anything on Leopard...
mac

Just FYI...Drive Genius 2 just came out and support defrag'ing within Leopard...

http://www.prosoftengineering.com/products/drive_genius_features.php?PHPSESSID=db278877e018a78aff4b42ccbc7dbd33

I plan to get it and use it!

-Brian

[/\/\]

You can't run Windows on Boot Camp if you have the RAID card.

is it not possible to use an external drive for bootcamp?

[ManWithAPlan]

You can't run Windows on Boot Camp if you have the RAID card.

It *should* work, but I can't try it until Friday when I get my new MP! But I have heard of folks using the 4th drive bay for Vista or WinXP, etc. and using Bootcamp for that drive only. Not entirely sure where I read that though.

In my case, I'm planning on using VMWare's Fusion to run multiple OS's simultaneously with OSX server. I'm using 16GB of RAM, so shouldn't be a problem. Not sure if I'll miss not having Bootcamp, if I decide to use all 4 drives for my RAID5. I don't use my machine for gaming really, so i doubt I'll miss not having Bootcamp. I love VMWare in general, been a huge fan on windows side, so will be doing lots with that. Lookin forward to 5 OS's running simultaneously!

Brian

[mac666er]

I read through this thread - and see that Windows won't work with the RAID card - but what if you only set up RAID with say, three drives, and leave the fourth unraided? Can you then install Windows via bootcamp on that unraided drive? Or is the issue that once the RAID card is installed, Windows won't see it?

It seems like three disks on RAID 5 could be a good choice as you get less of a capacity penalty as you would with four...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306212

The problem with this approach is that during the bootcamp installation you need to reboot and once this happens your mac will not boot. This is because the machine is looking for some windows boot disk, but since the RAID card isn't supported, it cycles through the boot process looking for drives attached to the machine, and eventually shows a question mark on the screen :-(

[mac666er]

Well... The four drives I mentionned are WD Caviar RE2 Raid Edition (WD7500AYYS), and they all fail no matter what. One was DOA, another one died soon after (no longer recognized, even when I reconnect the iPass cable to the motherboard). The last two cause diskutil to fail with an error code -9944 while attempting to format them. The drives then start clicking for ever (sounding like a cricket or something). The same thing occur when I try to build a RAID with them (even a straighforward enhanced JBOD). No RAID is ever built as RAID utility spins the candybar for ever.
In short, they're all server grade, brand new, and just plain dead. As is the fifth one (customer grade, SE16) bought elsewhere. It's no longer listed in the devices list too (/dev/disk*).

The fact that you have the same drives up and running allow me to discard the assumption by which there could be an incompatibility between the card and the drives. I'm left with two : a somewhat faulty RAID card is killing them for some reason, or all WD drives were damagaged/bad.
I want to believe the later is true as a tribute to Murphy's law :o


Hmmm You are right, you have bad drives, the giveaway is the clicking sound. Once you have this your disks are gone. In fact most hard drive repair shops advice to automatically pull the drives from the system once this happens in order to avoid any damages to the disk and have better chances at data recovery.

Sorry to hear about your loss, but you can talk to the store where you bought them and exchange them, or at the very least contact Western Digital and ask for an exchange, that is what the warranty is for, right?

Last time this happened to me was with a Seagate drive and they did exchange it, no questions asked. Also, a friend of mine just lost his Toshiba last year. Hard drive failure is not that uncommon, and also of note is that you bought all drives at once, maybe you got a bad batch of drives?

mac

[mac666er]

is it not possible to use an external drive for bootcamp?

No, check Apple's documentation. If you try this, bootcamp will tell you that it is unsupported and quit :-(

[Rick Here]

No, check Apple's documentation. If you try this, bootcamp will tell you that it is unsupported and quit :-(
Get an iPASS cable to plug into the motherboard iPass port. Run this cable to external drives or mount them in one of the CD bays. OSX will recognize the drives as usual from the motherboard, place bootcamp and windows on this drive or drives. Leave the RAID card for OSX. Best of both worlds. The problem is there is no windows RAID card driver. When in windows the RAID volumes will not be seen. In OSX all drives and RAID volumes will be there.

Cheers

[/\/\]

Sounds good

I found a tutorial (http://macenstein.com/default/archives/678)

[mac666er]

Get an iPASS cable to plug into the motherboard iPass port. Run this cable to external drives or mount them in one of the CD bays. OSX will recognize the drives as usual from the motherboard, place bootcamp and windows on this drive or drives. Leave the RAID card for OSX. Best of both worlds. The problem is there is no windows RAID card driver. When in windows the RAID volumes will not be seen. In OSX all drives and RAID volumes will be there.

Cheers

Rick, have you tried this? I somehow understood from message 83 on this thread that this wouldn't work, and that an eSATA controller was the only way to go.

I haven't tried this iPass cable trick, but I have read that people that have tried this with hard drives and blu-ray drives can't boot from this setup. That the mac can't boot from the extra SATA connectors on the motherboard (the ones were the iPass connector sits on non-RAIDed Mac Pros).

[kittiyut]

Oh Dear God This is insane!

Please, for the love of God and for your own good... put the card in your box and let it charge fully before connecting the drives to it.

Setup hung and I hard to cold-start the box. This caused the volume to show an error and now the system is slow. REAL slow, like almost 20 minutes to boot.

This is stupid. 8 hours of charging now and still not charged. I think Apple REALLY dropped the ball on this. There is no reason that they couldn't have shipped it with a charged battery.

My RAID card came installed with my MP and I didn't read this post before installing my HDs. Fortunately it didn't take long for the battery to be "charged". I can't remember whether I started the process (setting up RAID 5) before or after the battery was charged. I'm using 4 x 1TB seagate NS drives (they are very quiet btw) and it is taking forever to initialize. Does anyone know how long it would take? Does it matter if you create the array and initialize before or after the battery is charged? Good thing I read this post before attempting to install Leopard before initialization is complete!

[65StangBoy]

My RAID card came installed with my MP and I didn't read this post before installing my HDs. Fortunately it didn't take long for the battery to be "charged". I can't remember whether I started the process (setting up RAID 5) before or after the battery was charged. I'm using 4 x 1TB seagate NS drives (they are very quiet btw) and it is taking forever to initialize. Does anyone know how long it would take? Does it matter if you create the array and initialize before or after the battery is charged? Good thing I read this post before attempting to install Leopard before initialization is complete!

I believe it took around 16 hours to initialize my 4x750GB Raid 5 array. So it'll probably take a couple extra hours for your 4x1TB drives. You definately do not want to do anything until the battery is charged. EVERYTHING takes significantly longer with a discharged battery. I also tried installing Leopard before the Raid 5 finished and it took forever. It's not worth doing anything until the battery is charged and the array is initialized.

[ManWithAPlan]

I believe it took around 16 hours to initialize my 4x750GB Raid 5 array. So it'll probably take a couple extra hours for your 4x1TB drives. You definately do not want to do anything until the battery is charged. EVERYTHING takes significantly longer with a discharged battery. I also tried installing Leopard before the Raid 5 finished and it took forever. It's not worth doing anything until the battery is charged and the array is initialized.

So, I've read the RAID Utility User Guide in anticipation of my new MP, I'm curious, did you just create one massive 4-drive RAID5 volume? Or did you create separate volumes within your RAID5 set? I'm still debating on how best to set mine up when I get it.

Thanks,
Brian

[kittiyut]

I believe it took around 16 hours to initialize my 4x750GB Raid 5 array. So it'll probably take a couple extra hours for your 4x1TB drives. You definately do not want to do anything until the battery is charged. EVERYTHING takes significantly longer with a discharged battery. I also tried installing Leopard before the Raid 5 finished and it took forever. It's not worth doing anything until the battery is charged and the array is initialized.

You are probably right. It has been going on for 7-8 hours now and the progress bar is just about half way. I wonder whether you have to go through this lengthy init process again if you delete the volume(s) you created on the array and create a new one?

[65StangBoy]

So, I've read the RAID Utility User Guide in anticipation of my new MP, I'm curious, did you just create one massive 4-drive RAID5 volume? Or did you create separate volumes within your RAID5 set? I'm still debating on how best to set mine up when I get it.

Thanks,
Brian

I created two volumes out of my RAID5. One 300GB volume for the OS/Apps, and one 1.5TB volume for storage and the home directories. It is very nice having the home directories separate from the OS. I accidentally wiped out my OS volume and was very glad that I didn't also wipe out my documents, music, movies, etc.

[65StangBoy]

You are probably right. It has been going on for 7-8 hours now and the progress bar is just about half way. I wonder whether you have to go through this lengthy init process again if you delete the volume(s) you created on the array and create a new one?

If you delete the volumes no, if you delete the array and recreate it yes.

[mac666er]

You are probably right. It has been going on for 7-8 hours now and the progress bar is just about half way. I wonder whether you have to go through this lengthy init process again if you delete the volume(s) you created on the array and create a new one?

I changed a faulty drive from my RAID (750GB drive) and to recondition the Array back to normal with a new drive took 8 hours... insane.

But to be fair I was able to work normally during the process, it was completely transparent for normal work.

But if you create a new RAID then you will definitely have to wait more than 12 hrs... :(

[kakace]

I finally bought another set of four drives (WD Caviar SE16) from another reseller. They arrived in good shape, and a RAID-5 array is initializing right now.
As that was strongly suggested, the other five drives were just toasted.

[ManWithAPlan]

I finally bought another set of four drives (WD Caviar SE16) from another reseller. They arrived in good shape, and a RAID-5 array is initializing right now.
As that was strongly suggested, the other five drives were just toasted.

You gonna build just 1 super big RAID5 volume, or divide the RAID5 set up into separate volumes??? Just curious, lookin for ideas there.

Glad to hear your makin headway there, i was pullin for ya!

Cheers!
Brian

[kittiyut]

Just a note to all of you who ordered the RAID card and want to use the ODD with the NewerTech external eSATA connector (http://www.newertech.com/products/esata_cable.php) - If you want to tuck the cables away behind the hard drives, the RAID card has to move down 1 slot, the problem is - the cable connecting the RAID card to the motherboard is very short and tight. Also, the instructions that came with the eSATA only applies to single processor (4 core), not 8 core.

It seems like my MP takes a while to boot up. There is quite a delay after you hear the BOOOING sound and see the wheel spinning. Is that normal?

[kakace]

You gonna build just 1 super big RAID5 volume, or divide the RAID5 set up into separate volumes??? Just curious, lookin for ideas there.
I divided it in 4 volumes :
- 150 GB for OS/apps/home
- 100 GB scratch disk
- 250 GB for Time Machine (backup the first volume only)
- The reminder for video datas
The main goal was to have a dedicated volume for backups (instead of being forced to use an external drive plugged all day long), to move constantly changing datas out of my main volume (hence the scratch volume), and to have large files out of the way for backups (hence the "video" volume).

[louden]

I divided it in 4 volumes :
- 150 GB for OS/apps/home
- 100 GB scratch disk
- 250 GB for Time Machine (backup the first volume only)
- The reminder for video datas
The main goal was to have a dedicated volume for backups (instead of being forced to use an external drive plugged all day long), to move constantly changing datas out of my main volume (hence the scratch volume), and to have large files out of the way for backups (hence the "video" volume).

Seems a bit pointless - you're already protected by the RAID array - if you really wanted another backup - why not just backup to some external device and free that space for something else?

[65StangBoy]

Just a note to all of you who ordered the RAID card and want to use the ODD with the NewerTech external eSATA connector (http://www.newertech.com/products/esata_cable.php) - If you want to tuck the cables away behind the hard drives, the RAID card has to move down 1 slot, the problem is - the cable connecting the RAID card to the motherboard is very short and tight. Also, the instructions that came with the eSATA only applies to single processor (4 core), not 8 core.

It seems like my MP takes a while to boot up. There is quite a delay after you hear the BOOOING sound and see the wheel spinning. Is that normal?

Yes, it's normal to have the added delay when booting with the RAID card. I read somewhere that the card does a staggered spin-up on the drives as to take some load off the power supply.

[kakace]

Seems a bit pointless - you're already protected by the RAID array - if you really wanted another backup - why not just backup to some external device and free that space for something else?
First of all, it's just not yet another backup but the only backup I have. A RAID array doesn't protect you against your own mistakes.
Second, I just don't want to have an external drive plugged all day long to back things up when Time Machine (or anything else for that matter) decides to do so. Backups need to be protected against drives failures too. Beside, automatic backups are the way to go because humans tend to be lazy. It's always fun to discover you forgot to save your work once it has been deleted or lost.
I'll probably move the backup partition to an external RAID array in the future if I really feel the needs to do so. For now, backing up to a single cheap external drive is a "no go".

[MacFanBoyIIe]

I created two volumes out of my RAID5. One 300GB volume for the OS/Apps, and one 1.5TB volume for storage and the home directories. It is very nice having the home directories separate from the OS. I accidentally wiped out my OS volume and was very glad that I didn't also wipe out my documents, music, movies, etc.

I'm curious how the above setup is working for you? I'm interested in implementing a similar RAID 5 setup, but I have a couple of multi-part questions:

1) At what point during the RAID 5 setup do you create multiple volumes and how is it done?

2) How/when do you set up the home directories to be on a separate volume from the OS/Apps volume and does the user have to do anything special during daily use to ensure they aren't saving/modifying anything on the OS/Apps volume?

OK, I lied. Third question:
I have four 250GB Barracudas sitting around and was wondering if they will work in a RAID 5 in my Mac Pro. I haven't heard of anyone using HDDs this small in a RAID 5 and Apple's website only talks about 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB in bays 2-4. Does anyone have this setup or know if it will work?

Thanks!

[ManWithAPlan]

Well, my dream machine arrived on Friday night in a snowstorm up here. I unboxed it Friday night, and let it warm up to the ambient room temperature over night. Here is where I'm at and what I noticed along the way FWIW...

1. The RAID battery charged completely withing 3 hours of powering up.

2. Once it charged (I waited to do anything until it was charged), I decided to leave the OS/Apps on the 1TB Apple/Hitachi drive in Bay 1, in the standard JBOD+ config (no RAID, but takes advantage of the RAID cards cache and battery backup).

3. I have decided to dedicate Bay 1 to OS/Apps permanently, and just use aggressive back-up strategies for Bay 1, backing up the OS and all Apps daily via Time Machine to an external 1TB USB drive.

4. I have begun migrating Bays 2-4 (3x1TB Apple/Hitachi drives) to a RAID5 set. RAID Utility has begun cranking away on that, and it looks like the result will be 1.78TB of usable space in that RAID5. Contrast that with the 2.24TB that I would have gotten in a 4-drive RAID5 set, and you see why I did this...a 4-drive RAID5 set is a fairly inefficient use of a bay, with only 500GB difference between the two. Apple has a support article about the realities of 4-drive RAID5 sets, folks can check that out.

5. I will report on how long this RAID5 migration takes, it is gonna be a long time I think...time to get some sleep, maybe it'll be done by morning!

Cheers guys!

[MacFanBoyIIe]

I have decided to dedicate Bay 1 to OS/Apps permanently, and just use aggressive back-up strategies for Bay 1, backing up the OS and all Apps daily via Time Machine to an external 1TB USB drive.

Congrats on getting your new Mac Pro!
Question on Time Machine, since I still haven't upgraded from 10.4.11:
With your setup, will you be able to use Time Machine to back up both Bay 1 and the single RAID 5 volume on Bays 2-4?
Will you be using the same storage device or two separate ones?

[MacFanBoyIIe]

I know RAID 5 is a striped set with distributed parity. But, what I don't know is how you can do this and not use up half of your available disk space in distributing the parity. I know the diagram I included must be incorrect (I made it, LOL) but that's how I understand a three disk RAID 5. The data and it's parity is represented by the colors/letters distributed across two different disks.

From the diagram you can deduce the following formula for this type of array:
(size of one drive) * (number of drives) / 2 = useable space
I know this has to be incorrect because the correct formula for a 3 disk RAID says you will get 2/3 of your array as useable space (size of one drive * n) * (n - 1)/n = useable space), right?
I'm not trying to teach the incorrect math here, just trying to understand how you can back up 2/3 of the total disk space using only the remaining 1/3 of disk space in a three disk RAID 5. Anyone want to teach me how this works?

[kakace]

I'm not trying to teach the incorrect math here, just trying to understand how you can back up 2/3 of the total disk space using only the remaining 1/3 of disk space in a three disk RAID 5. Anyone want to teach me how this works?
To make it simple, although too simplistic :
C = A xor B <=> A = C xor B <=> B = C xor A

The third disk is not a backup of the other two per se, but it stores the result of an equation whose parameters are the datas on the other two (or more) disks.

[ManWithAPlan]

Congrats on getting your new Mac Pro!
Question on Time Machine, since I still haven't upgraded from 10.4.11:
With your setup, will you be able to use Time Machine to back up both Bay 1 and the single RAID 5 volume on Bays 2-4?
Will you be using the same storage device or two separate ones?

I'm pretty sure I will be able to, yes. But I'm not worried if Time Machine is somehow not capable of it. I've got an external NAS also, with plenty of space on it (ReadyNAS+) and that can reach out and grab the data I tell it to, rather than having the server push it. There's also things like SuperDuper, EMC's Retrospect, etc. all of which can achieve this.

In the end, I expect to be backing up my OS/Apps drive to a certain external drive and the large data volume to another separate external drive.

By the way, my RAID5 "transition" is still proceeding here, roughly 90% done....it has been 8 hours now and still counting...again, the volume of available space for this 3-drive RAID5 is going to be 1.78TB....should be plenty for a data volume (for now!)....

[ManWithAPlan]

OK, it took exactly 8 hours, 29 minutes, but my 3-drive RAID5 set is done initializing! Again, this was for 3 of the 1TB Apple/Hitachi Deskstar drives.

I hope that helps others in planning their time wisely!

Cheers!

[MrPDaddyHimself]

OK, it took exactly 8 hours, 29 minutes, but my 3-drive RAID5 set is done initializing! Again, this was for 3 of the 1TB Apple/Hitachi Deskstar drives.

I hope that helps others in planning their time wisely!

Cheers!

Id be interested in knowing your step by step procedure if you have it. Send me a message if you can. I'm considering almost the same setup. But I am also considering a RAID 0 on those three 1 TB drives. Thanks.

[MacFanBoyIIe]

I'm pretty sure I will be able to, yes. But I'm not worried if Time Machine is somehow not capable of it. I've got an external NAS also, with plenty of space on it (ReadyNAS+) and that can reach out and grab the data I tell it to, rather than having the server push it. There's also things like SuperDuper, EMC's Retrospect, etc. all of which can achieve this.

In the end, I expect to be backing up my OS/Apps drive to a certain external drive and the large data volume to another separate external drive.

Sounds like a pretty good backup scheme.
I'm still stewing about how to set mine up. No hurry though. However, I'd really like to know if it's better to plug into an eSATA for the OS/Apps drive, allowing all of the drives on the RAID controller to actually run a RAID volume. To me, and this is just my humble opinion, it seems a waste to use up a drive connected to the RAID card but not actually part of a RAID set. YMMV, as I said, I'm just stewing...

[MacFanBoyIIe]

To make it simple, although too simplistic :
C = A xor B <=> A = C xor B <=> B = C xor A

The third disk is not a backup of the other two per se, but it stores the result of an equation whose parameters are the datas on the other two (or more) disks.

OK, makes more sense now. The third "disk" uses less space because it doesn't actually store a mirror of the data, instead it stores the output of an algorithm the other two disks are parameter, as you say. Got it. Thanks.

[ManWithAPlan]

Sounds like a pretty good backup scheme.
I'm still stewing about how to set mine up. No hurry though. However, I'd really like to know if it's better to plug into an eSATA for the OS/Apps drive, allowing all of the drives on the RAID controller to actually run a RAID volume. To me, and this is just my humble opinion, it seems a waste to use up a drive connected to the RAID card but not actually part of a RAID set. YMMV, as I said, I'm just stewing...

Why mess with external SATA connectors, hacking around with the insides of the Mac, when there is little to nothing to gain by doing so. I'm a systems engineer for a server software company, I have worked with server hardware and software for 15 years, I am very comfortable with such things, but it comes down to not wanting to spend my free time tweaking for the sake of tweaking, when there are so many other things to spend my time enjoying my computer with. The RAID construct that I have now is very capable, without going crazy on it. It blows away any machine I've ever owned, and my backup strategy will ensure that my family's digital memories will be safe, and serving them up to the extended family will be a ton of fun with OSX Server. This box also makes a great lab platform for me for virtual machines supporting multiple disparate OS's (FreeBSD,Win2K3 Server,Vista,XP,RedHat, etc.).

Most folks recommend creating a single, fast, dedicated boot drive, for nothing but the OS (or multiple OS's via VM's) and the apps. Search in the forums on macgurus.com under the RAID area. When the subject of RAID'ing your boot drive comes around, most IT professionals will tell you that it is total overkill at best, and a misguided use of resources at worst. Any machine of the power and speed of the current MacPro's is very capable of running complex software at a lightning fast pace...the bottlenecks come up when modifying or reading data, especially large files like HD video, high resolution photography, etc. That is why its so great to leverage a high-speed hardware RAID solution for the Data volume(s). The speed is a huge part of it, and of course the fault tolerance of being able to keep working even when a drive fails. It's a fact that software is much more easily replaced than the cherished memories we all have in our photos, movies, music, etc. Put your RAID emphasis on data files, not software applications. Use daily/weekly backups to provide a DR scheme for your software. Do the same for your data as well, but with the added peace of mind that you've also got some internal failover capability on box (not to mention the speed gains!)....

That's my take on all this, after noodling on it night and day for a week, prior to getting the new toy!

By the way, keep in mind that the single JBOD+ disk for OS/apps still benefits from the 256MB cache on the RAID card, not to mention the backup battery should a power event occur. It's not like you are getting no benefit from the RAID card for that drive. To each his own, for sure...the nice part is that none of this needs to be permanent, if you choose a strategy, and you don't like it, just re-image and start over...trial and error are most likely the best approach.

[MacInMotion]

The card has an x8 interface, so the proper configuration is x16/x1/x1/x8. However, if you are not doing 3D graphics, you will want to reconfigure the slots for x8/x8/x1/x8 (Config Option 3).

The RAID Card MUST be in slot 4. It's not an interface requirement, but a cable requirement. The iPass cable will NOT reach any other slot. So, you would move the AJA Kona LHe to slot 2, and have the video card reduces to x8. Still plenty of bandwidth for HD video, just not 3D games.

On the Early 2008 Mac Pro's, the top slot is a 4x PCI slot and the RAID card seems to perform just as well. So I believe the RAID card is only a 4 lane card. That's 1 GB/s (1 GigaBYTE/second) of bandwith, plenty for a 4 disk RAID card.

[MacInMotion]

Most folks recommend creating a single, fast, dedicated boot drive, for nothing but the OS (or multiple OS's via VM's) and the apps.

<snip>

Put your RAID emphasis on data files, not software applications. Use daily/weekly backups to provide a DR scheme for your software.

I generally agree with ManWithAPlan, but unfortunately Apple insists on keeping all of the user's "home" directory (all the data files) on the boot drive, which gets even worse if you're using FileVault (which, now that Spotlight indexes EVERYTHING, is really the only way to keep other users of your computer from accidentally reading your mail).

Fortunately, TimeMachine is supposed to backup stuff in FileVault properly (file at a time, keeping it encrypted), so I'm going to have to rely on that.

After that, though, let me say that random access time is much more important than throughput on your OS drive, so that's where to spring for a SAS drive. See my other post here (http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=5030047&postcount=21) for details.

[MacInMotion]

Oh Dear God This is insane!

Please, for the love of God and for your own good... put the card in your box and let it charge fully before connecting the drives to it.

Setup hung and I hard to cold-start the box. This caused the volume to show an error and now the system is slow. REAL slow, like almost 20 minutes to boot.

I agree if you are planning on booting off a RAID array. If you're using a plain disk for boot and then a 3-drive RAID array, you can get a little bit of work done before the battery charges. See below.

I believe it took around 16 hours to initialize my 4x750GB Raid 5 array. So it'll probably take a couple extra hours for your 4x1TB drives. You definately do not want to do anything until the battery is charged. EVERYTHING takes significantly longer with a discharged battery. I also tried installing Leopard before the Raid 5 finished and it took forever. It's not worth doing anything until the battery is charged and the array is initialized.


I ordered the RAID card separately in case I wanted to send it back. It was a very difficult install, impossible with the tools that ship with it. I had to remove the drive bay 1 SAS/SATA connector so I could get the iPass cable to go the other way (towards the card), being careful not to break the very fine wires in the area. Then, as tough as it was taking the whole computer apart, it was even tougher to get the fan assembly screwed back in, because now there is a 9 inch deep slot you have to work in because the card is in the way, barely enough width to get my hand in, and definitely not enough to use the right-angle Phillips screwdriver that comes with the card. I thought I was going to have to go out and buy a long screwdriver with an attachment to hold the screw on the end of it but I lucked out and managed to squeeze the screw in between my second and third fingers. I'm not looking forward to doing this again when my iPass cable shows up.

Then, for my card, it took 32 hours for the battery to reach an acceptable charge. Apparently it had to go through 2 or 3 reconditioning cycles. Writing to the RAID array, even after it had finished initializing, without the battery (and therefore the write cache) was a painful experience. Peak sequential writes were 20MB/sec. I killed the OS X install when it predicted it would take 6 hours. But all this time I was easily configuring my non-RAID SAS boot drive. [Follow up: that battery died in only 8 months, necessitating a replacement.]

I say if your battery isn't nearly full when you start up your computer, go ahead and set up and initialize your RAID sets and volumes, you might as well have the drives doing something while it's charging the battery and that works in the background easily, but don't try to do anything more than that. It took almost exactly 12 hours to initialize my 3 X 750GB Ultrastar SATA RAID5 array, and yes, it might have only taken 2-4 hours if the battery was charged but it was overnight either way.

Now that things are up and running, I'm getting about 150MB/s read and write off the RAID 5 array, compared to 110MB/s off the SAS drive and 20MB/s write without the battery. But the SAS drive blows the RAID array away with random read/write performance, which is what you need for the OS: lots of accesses of tiny files.

[ManWithAPlan]

I generally agree with ManWithAPlan, but unfortunately Apple insists on keeping all of the user's "home" directory (all the data files) on the boot drive, which gets even worse if you're using FileVault (which, now that Spotlight indexes EVERYTHING, is really the only way to keep other users of your computer from accidentally reading your mail).

Fortunately, TimeMachine is supposed to backup stuff in FileVault properly (file at a time, keeping it encrypted), so I'm going to have to rely on that.

After that, though, let me say that random access time is much more important than throughput on your OS drive, so that's where to spring for a SAS drive. See my other post here (http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=5030047&postcount=21) for details.

It insists, but you don't need to listen :-) Moving home folders to the data drive is a slam dunk...check it out...

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071025220746340&query=moving%2Bhome%2Bdirectory

[MacFanBoyIIe]

Why mess with external SATA connectors, hacking around with the insides of the Mac, when there is little to nothing to gain by doing so....but it comes down to not wanting to spend my free time tweaking for the sake of tweaking, when there are so many other things to spend my time enjoying my computer with. The RAID construct that I have now is very capable, without going crazy on it....This box also makes a great lab platform for me for virtual machines supporting multiple disparate OS's (FreeBSD,Win2K3 Server,Vista,XP,RedHat, etc.)....By the way, keep in mind that the single JBOD+ disk for OS/apps still benefits from the 256MB cache on the RAID card, not to mention the backup battery should a power event occur. It's not like you are getting no benefit from the RAID card for that drive.

Great post. Looks like we agree that the take on this is "YMMV" and to each his own. A few after-thoughts:
I think there is plenty (PLENTY!) to gain by hooking up an eSATA to the motherboard. I mean, it's there! Use it! We are proud Mac users and geeks. Tweaking is how we all got started in the Tech Industry! I agree you have a great RAID construct. I also agree that you could use your box for lab work on other OSs. That's another reason for an eSATA port on the back of your box; use it for a sandbox HDD with other OSs. Or you could mount your boot drive in the lower DVD bay, tucked away and secure allowing you FULL access to all 4 RAID slots for your data drive.
I know you are getting some benefits by keeping your boot drive attached to the RAID card (taking advantage of the cache and backup), but like you said, your boot drive is heavily backed up, and easy to re-install if necessary. If you really wanted to keep your OS/Apps drive attached to the RAID card, you could STILL hook up to the other SATA ports, install another internal HDD in the lower DVD bay and use SuperDuper to clone your OS/Apps drive to it as pseudo-hot-spare.
My point is, the possible configurations you give yourself by adding the eSATA are increased greatly and we LOVE TO TINKER with our Macs. I still haven't heard a good reason NOT to do it. That's just my take, FWIW.
Configuration debate aside, how do you like your new Mac Pro?

[MacFanBoyIIe]

It insists, but you don't need to listen :-) Moving home folders to the data drive is a slam dunk...check it out...

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071025220746340&query=moving%2Bhome%2Bdirectory

Very true. I found out on another forum that it is much easier in Leo to switch volumes than it was in Tiger. Good tutorial.

[MacInMotion]

It insists, but you don't need to listen :-) Moving home folders to the data drive is a slam dunk...check it out...

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071025220746340&query=moving%2Bhome%2Bdirectory

Thanks for that tip; I hadn't heard about that. Given OS X's Unix underpinnings, I'm sure that moving the home directory mostly works, but given all of Apple's enhancements, I'm scared of trying it in combination with FileVault and TimeMachine. It just seems like an area ripe for serious bugs/failures that would not only wipe out the primary data, but the backup, too.

Before Spotlight, I thought FileVault was a bit of overkill for most things, but now it's the only way to keep Spotlight from exporting all your information to the other people using your computer while still allowing you to use Spotlight on it yourself. (This is because FileVault works by creating a separate volume for your home directory and Spotlight indexes by volume.)

[tokenfirstyear]

DO NOT BUY AN APPLE MAC PRO RAID CARD

This card is being returned Monday morning.
According to the Product Specialist, the battery takes 7 days to charge.

Every 30 days days the card will recondition the battery. A recondition cycle is draining the battery for 24 hours, then charging it for 7 days.

ANY time the battery is not fully charged, the write cache is disabled.

SO, 8 days EACH MONTH the system will run slow.

This is the single worst RAID controller that I have ever worked with.

Just to correct some misinformation - this is from Article 306231:

Question: Why am I presented with a warning in RAID Utility that the write cache is disabled due to the backup battery lacking a 72-hour charge?

Answer: The write cache is disabled automatically to protect data being written to RAID volumes when the battery charge is not sufficient to back up cached data for 72 hours. This message is normally encountered when a RAID Card is used for the first time, when the battery enters a conditioning cycle once every three months, or when a computer with a RAID Card installed is shut down for any length of time.

[MacFanBoyIIe]

Just to correct some misinformation - this is from Article 306231:

Question: Why am I presented with a warning in RAID Utility that the write cache is disabled due to the backup battery lacking a 72-hour charge?

Answer: The write cache is disabled automatically to protect data being written to RAID volumes when the battery charge is not sufficient to back up cached data for 72 hours. This message is normally encountered when a RAID Card is used for the first time, when the battery enters a conditioning cycle once every three months, or when a computer with a RAID Card installed is shut down for any length of time.

Thanks, but we know. Read the rest of the thread.

[Stuart in Oz]

Thanks, but we know. Read the rest of the thread.

I just read the entire thread and I didn't see that specifically mentioned before.

I'm about to order a Mac Pro for my business where it's going to be an office server for my accounting software (MoneyWorks) and several product & document databases we run using FileMaker.

Most people posting here seem most concerned with input and output speeds (I guess you're all doing video & photo editing) but I need reliability and maximum uptime rather than high file read/write speeds. RAID 1 is what I'm probably going with, with daily incremental backups to an external source - DVD or tape (if I can find a tape drive for Mac these days).

Does anyone else here have any experience with using the Apple RAID card for this type of situation? Any suggestions?

[MacInMotion]

I just read the entire thread and I didn't see that specifically mentioned before.

It's easy to miss, but it is here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=4474402&highlight=months#post4474402


I'm about to order a Mac Pro for my business where it's going to be an office server for my accounting software (MoneyWorks) and several product & document databases we run using FileMaker.

Most people posting here seem most concerned with input and output speeds (I guess you're all doing video & photo editing) but I need reliability and maximum uptime rather than high file read/write speeds. RAID 1 is what I'm probably going with, with daily incremental backups to an external source - DVD or tape (if I can find a tape drive for Mac these days).

Does anyone else here have any experience with using the Apple RAID card for this type of situation? Any suggestions?

The RAID card it not necessary in your situation. You will do fine with software RAID 1. The RAID card is only worth the money if you want/need RAID 5 or if you want to use SAS drives or if you want to get the most speed possible. I have it because, like most of the other posters, I'm working with video where I need the speed, and because I'm working with direct-to-disk video where I need the safety of RAID 5 without the storage penalty of RAID 1, and because I'm a geek and want the high performance of a 15,000 RPM SAS drive for my boot drive.

As for external backups, I recommend SATA drives in a trayless enclosure which lets you treat SATA drives like floppy disks. They are cost-competitive with tape and of course faster, too. The only reason to use tape is for long-term (> 5 years) archiving or if you have massive amounts of data to back up. Here's the cost comparison:

800GB LTO-4 tape is $80, so 4TB of tape storage costs $400
500GB Hitachi Deskstart P7K500 is $80, so 4TB of disk storage costs $640

However, you have to factor in that an internal trayless SATA enclosure from Wiebetech is $30, while the cheapest LTO-4 Tape drive I've seen is $4,000 plus you need to spend more on a SCSI host adapter. So although at first glance the disks look more expensive at $160/TB instead of $100/TB, you'd have to store over 65TB of data to break even on the cost of the tape drive.

Of course prices are constantly changing and you might want to reassess at some point, but for the amount of data I have to back up (less than 3TB) it's a no-brainer. I can keep 4 sets of backups rotating on and off site using SATA drives and still not spend half of what I'd spend on a tape drive. I can also deliver to clients on SATA drives that they all can read with existing hardware instead of giving them LTO tapes that very few of them can do anything with.

[mac666er]

I hope mike/mission is still aware of this thread...

For the later posters, I'll give a quick update of what just happened to me in the last weeks.

I have a mac pro (2007) with an Apple RAID card and I was looking for a way to boot windows off a drive that was NOT connected to the RAID card. It just so happens that mission75 told us that he had an esata card that could boot windows:

you cant with windows but you can with a sata controller. I'm booting 2 windows OS right now with a FirmTek 2 slot sata controller. I didn't know it was possible. I found just by trying it. Windows is very hardware oriented to work with as many different types of computers so it will freak out if you try to boot from a firewire. I too want to boot windows via a raid card, but have no idea if you can.

So I decided to buy it and give a try... And so I installed windows (not bootcamp) on a drive attached to it and guess what? It worked! I installed XP and was able to boot XP on my mac pro via this way! However it was only with a few caveats:


All the drives have to be unplugged from the RAID card
Windows has to be installed on the drive BEFORE you try to boot it from the esata card (as mission said) AND the card driver has to be on the drive.


But it will definitely boot. Now the tricky part and the reason that I am posting is that I am trying to find a way to have ALL the RAID drives plugged in AND still be able to boot off this e-sata drive.

Sadly, I haven't had any success trying to do this as I installed rEFIt on my mac pro and the RAID partition is present but NOT the e-sata partition :-( Fiddling in rEFIt the Apple RAID card is recognized, as well as the e-sata one but I haven't been able to get the external hard disk partition (FAT) to load in rEFIt, I am starting to think that there needs to be an EFI e-sata card driver loaded in order for rEFIt to "see" the e-sata partition...

If I find how to overcome this I'll definitely post it...

M.

[MacInMotion]

I have a mac pro (2007) with an Apple RAID card and I was looking for a way to boot windows off a drive that was NOT connected to the RAID card. It just so happens that mission75 told us that he had an esata card that could boot windows:



So I decided to buy it and give a try... And so I installed windows (not bootcamp) on a drive attached to it and guess what? It worked! I installed XP and was able to boot XP on my mac pro via this way! However it was only with a few caveats:


All the drives have to be unplugged from the RAID card
Windows has to be installed on the drive BEFORE you try to boot it from the esata card (as mission said) AND the card driver has to be on the drive.


But it will definitely boot. Now the tricky part and the reason that I am posting is that I am trying to find a way to have ALL the RAID drives plugged in AND still be able to boot off this e-sata drive.



Well, you could have gotten an iPass cable, also known as a SFF 8087 cable, and an eSata bracket and used the eSata connections on the motherboard. That's what I'm doing. (Described in detail earlier in this thread or in another thread, I don't remember.) Or put the drive in the second optical drive bay.

There's no Windows driver for the Apple RAID card and until there is you won't be able to access the RAID when booted into Windows. The Mac OS will see the Windows drive, though, and you can use MacFuse to write to it.

Let me point out that I've done all that except use MacFuse and my benchmarks show that except for video performance, running Windows XP Pro on my Mac with VMware provides 95% of the performance of booting into Windows AND provides full access to the RAID array. It's a much better solution unless you really need the performance of your video card for what you are doing. In my case the performance boost that comes from having the OS and swap on a RAID array outweighs the minor VM penalty VMware imposes, so I actually do better with VMware than booted natively into Windows.

[mac666er]

Well, you could have gotten an iPass cable, also known as a SFF 8087 cable, and an eSata bracket and used the eSata connections on the motherboard. That's what I'm doing. (Described in detail earlier in this thread or in another thread, I don't remember.) Or put the drive in the second optical drive bay.

Thanks for the reply. But from all the threads that I have read, those internal Mac Pro ports DO NOT support booting windows. Look at the latest thread in the apple support forums (message 2):

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1488436&tstart=0

There's no Windows driver for the Apple RAID card and until there is you won't be able to access the RAID when booted into Windows. The Mac OS will see the Windows drive, though, and you can use MacFuse to write to it.

I don't want to access the RAID volume, I just want to be able to boot the Mac Pro to Windows to do some heavy computations and highend 3D graphics ( I have a quadro graphics card) and I would rather do this through the mac than to buy another workstation.

Let me point out that I've done all that except use MacFuse and my benchmarks show that except for video performance, running Windows XP Pro on my Mac with VMware provides 95% of the performance of booting into Windows AND provides full access to the RAID array. It's a much better solution unless you really need the performance of your video card for what you are doing. In my case the performance boost that comes from having the OS and swap on a RAID array outweighs the minor VM penalty VMware imposes, so I actually do better with VMware than booted natively into Windows.

This is interesting I never thought that the RAID would actually boost a virtual environment performance, thanks for the tip! So have you booted windows through external devices connected to the eSata extender cable?

[MacInMotion]

Thanks for the reply. But from all the threads that I have read, those internal Mac Pro ports DO NOT support booting windows. Look at the latest thread in the apple support forums (message 2):

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1488436&tstart=0



Don't confuse the two Optical Disk Drive SATA ports, which have limitations, with the 4 full-featured SATA ports that become available when you switch the internal bays over to the RAID card.

Yes, I've booted windows off an eSATA drive connected via iPass cable to the motherboard.

[mac666er]

Don't confuse the two Optical Disk Drive SATA ports, which have limitations, with the 4 full-featured SATA ports that become available when you switch the internal bays over to the RAID card.

Yes, I've booted windows off an eSATA drive connected via iPass cable to the motherboard.

Hmmm... thanks for the clarification! I wasn't aware that you could put 'another' i-pass cable in the connector where the original one used to be. So if I understood correctly in the searches I have done about this, you can plug an i-pass to 4 sata connectors cable, such as this one:

http://www.provantage.com/adaptec-2247000-r~7ADPC19L.htm

Then, connect those sata connectors to a faceplate that converts them to e-sata and then plug an e-sata hard drive there. And that further, all these e-sata ports would be bootable. That is interesting because I didn't know this was possible until you brought it up...

Do you recommend any particular brand?

M

[65StangBoy]

Don't mean to butt in. But that's absolutely correct, I've been running my system this way for about six months. I've got 4x750's in a RAID5 hooked up to the Apple RAID Card. I'm then running four more drives in an external eSata enclosure via the Logic Board iPass connector. One of which is my bootcamp drive. My current iPass to sata cable is too short so I have some extenders in there. When I get around to it I'll replace it with this cable. Similar to yours, just a little cheaper.

http://www.priceguidenetwork.com/computer-component/supermicro-ac-cbl-0097l-02-50cm-ipass-to-4-sata-cable-pb-free.html

Let me know if you want the exact layout and the parts that I used in my setup.

Hmmm... thanks for the clarification! I wasn't aware that you could put 'another' i-pass cable in the connector where the original one used to be. So if I understood correctly in the searches I have done about this, you can plug an i-pass to 4 sata connectors cable, such as this one:

http://www.provantage.com/adaptec-2247000-r~7ADPC19L.htm

Then, connect those sata connectors to a faceplate that converts them to e-sata and then plug an e-sata hard drive there. And that further, all these e-sata ports would be bootable. That is interesting because I didn't know this was possible until you brought it up...

Do you recommend any particular brand?

M

[nanofrog]

Opps.

[Beaner]

Reviving this thread, is there any word out of Apple when the Mac Raid card will have bootable windows drivers ? This is such a major bummer :mad:

[Rick Here]

Reviving this thread, is there any word out of Apple when the Mac Raid card will have bootable windows drivers ? This is such a major bummer :mad:

The CalDigit card will be out soon with drivers for both OSX and Windows.
My bet is Apple may never have drivers. It has been too much time, why support the oppositions OS.

[LethalWolfe]

The CalDigit card will be out soon with drivers for both OSX and Windows.
My bet is Apple may never have drivers. It has been too much time, why support the oppositions OS.
Because running the oppositions OS is a key selling point for OS X?


Lethal

[nanofrog]

I'd have to agree with LethalWolfe.

Apple makes an OS that supports MS's OS via Boot Camp, but their own RAID card doesn't work in this manner. Not good. There are plenty of people it seems, that have found themselves in this dilemma, and currently have no solution until Apple writes drivers. Or they can buy a different card. Inconsistent at best, but makes for pissed off customers. (Especially when the competitors cards that can do this are less expensive).

Just my $.02.

[yzjsky]

Hi,
I just got the raid card today, but after I connect it and all 4 SAS drives, the MAC OSX Installtion program can not detect the SAS at all, I open the RAID Utility but no dirve there, the battery is charging.

Do I have to wait for a full charged raid card so that the SAS drives can be detected?

:confused:

[MacInMotion]

I just got the raid card today, but after I connect it and all 4 SAS drives, the MAC OSX Installtion program can not detect the SAS at all, I open the RAID Utility but no dirve there, the battery is charging.

Do I have to wait for a full charged raid card so that the SAS drives can be detected?

No, the drives should be detected right away, although it will be VERY painful to write anything to them until the battery is charged. If the RAID card does not see any of the 4 drives (:apple:->About This Mac...->More info...->Hardware RAID should have information under "Drives") then you probably didn't connect the iPass cable to the card properly.

It might be possible that you didn't install the drives correctly, instead. Did you feel the drive connectors seat when you pushed the drives into the bays? Maybe try installing a SATA drive and see if it shows up (a) at all and (b) on the RAID card and not on the Serial-ATA bus.

When you get the drives recognized, I still recommend waiting until the battery charges before you start even formatting them.

[MacInMotion]

Reviving this thread, is there any word out of Apple when the Mac Raid card will have bootable windows drivers ? This is such a major bummer :mad:

FWIW, I did a lot of benchmark testing on VMware Fusion and found that at worst there was a 5% slowdown compared to using Bootcamp and in many cases less than that. And accessing the RAID array, of course, makes it faster than Bootcamp. The only reasons I've found to use Bootcamp over VMware are:

1) I am using software that bypasses DirectX and needs to access the video card directly. If your software will only work with certain supported video cards *and* the card you have is one of them (which it often isn't, because despite everything, Mac video cards are still different than PC video cards), then using Bootcamp gives you something VMware doesn't.

2) I need hardware access to a FireWire device (such as for updating the firmware in an external DVD burner).


I'm not saying other people don't have valid reasons for using Bootcamp, but using VMware is sooooo much better in many ways, not least of which is that you can use your RAID array and otherwise the performance is not noticeably different. I mean, face it, I bought a Mac because I want to use Mac OS, and I can't do that when I'm running Bootcamp. I can while using VMware.

And if you looked at VMware Fusion before and thought it was lacking in features, check out the newly released VMware Fusion 2.0. Lots of added features, from simple things like being able to rename virtual machines to convenient things like mapping Windows special folders (like My Documents) to Mac special folders, to really useful things like saving multiple snapshots of a system so you can revert to any previous state.

[ManWithAPlan]

FWIW, I did a lot of benchmark testing on VMware Fusion and found that at worst there was a 5% slowdown compared to using Bootcamp and in many cases less than that. And accessing the RAID array, of course, makes it faster than Bootcamp. The only reasons I've found to use Bootcamp over VMware are:

1) I am using software that bypasses DirectX and needs to access the video card directly. If your software will only work with certain supported video cards *and* the card you have is one of them (which it often isn't, because despite everything, Mac video cards are still different than PC video cards), then using Bootcamp gives you something VMware doesn't.

2) I need hardware access to a FireWire device (such as for updating the firmware in an external DVD burner).


I'm not saying other people don't have valid reasons for using Bootcamp, but using VMware is sooooo much better in many ways, not least of which is that you can use your RAID array and otherwise the performance is not noticeably different. I mean, face it, I bought a Mac because I want to use Mac OS, and I can't do that when I'm running Bootcamp. I can while using VMware.

And if you looked at VMware Fusion before and thought it was lacking in features, check out the newly released VMware Fusion 2.0. Lots of added features, from simple things like being able to rename virtual machines to convenient things like mapping Windows special folders (like My Documents) to Mac special folders, to really useful things like saving multiple snapshots of a system so you can revert to any previous state.

MacInMotion, long time no speak! Hey, question for ya...Fusion by default puts all your VM's under the user's home directory under Documents of all things!!!! How are you making sure that your VM slices end up on a volume that is on your RAID array? And also, are you saying that the other OS's in the VM machines themselves perform faster when sourced from a RAID'd volume?

I am currently reformatting my RAID sets actually, changing things up a bit, so I'm curious. I also use VM quite a bit, 4 guest OS's so far, and more to come.

Thanks again and cheers!!!
Brian

[MacInMotion]

Fusion by default puts all your VM's under the user's home directory under Documents of all things!!!! How are you making sure that your VM slices end up on a volume that is on your RAID array? And also, are you saying that the other OS's in the VM machines themselves perform faster when sourced from a RAID'd volume?

I didn't even notice where VMware puts things by default. I create all my VMs on RAID drives, either my internal RAID 5 or my external FW800 RAID 0. Either way, the VMs show *better* performance in some respects than running the same OS on the Mac hardware directly off a single SATA drive, which I attribute to the faster disk speed of the RAID array improving all the OS file access, including swapping.

Of course, running the Mac OS off a Cheetah 15K.6 SAS drive beats running it off a SATA RAID. :D My point is that while there are theoretical reasons to want to use BootCamp over VMware, improved performance isn't one of them.

[NightSailor]

I would be very interested in knowing if you can put 15k RPM SAS drives in a Mac Pro with this card.

You can buy these from Apple configured this way.

[nanofrog]

Old thread. :p

[rylin]

Old thread. :p

Necroposters make my day interesting ;)

[NightSailor]

Why would you want a slow crappy Apple Raid Controller?

Didn't you research these before purchasing?

[MacInMotion]

Why would you want a slow crappy Apple Raid Controller?

Didn't you research these before purchasing?

Yes, I did research it before purchasing, and at the time I bought mine, in early 2008, it was the only thing I could buy that would let me boot my Mac off a SAS drive as well as provide a RAID 5 SATA solution. BTW, I've been using a 15K SAS drive as my boot drive and 3 SATA drives in RAID 5 for video data since Feb of 2008 with excellent results.

In any case, don't be a hater. It doesn't do anyone any good for you to just throw insults. If you've got a better suggestion and the Apple RAID card, please tell us all about it. Otherwise keep your snarky comments to yourself.

[erixun]

I had a similar issue with the install of my card last year (see my blog post Three pools of blood (http://erixun.com/b2/?p=20)) but so far have been a happy camper. Well, let me take that back.... the battery failed and died. A quick trip to the Apple care center (I live in Singapore) got a new one on the road and it was in my beast within a week, so yeah I guess I am a happy camper.
I did have an issue with the utility software though, maybe some of you might have answers to. I get an entry in my utility log almost once a week posted "Jan 1" about some maintenance which causes the card to go into a charge cycle. Every week I get this same event dated 1st of Jan along with any regular card events dated on their proper dates (which is usually one a month). Any ideas?
http://erixun.com/b2/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/picture-1.png

[ahiemstra]

Don't mean to butt in. But that's absolutely correct, I've been running my system this way for about six months. I've got 4x750's in a RAID5 hooked up to the Apple RAID Card. I'm then running four more drives in an external eSata enclosure via the Logic Board iPass connector. One of which is my bootcamp drive. My current iPass to sata cable is too short so I have some extenders in there. When I get around to it I'll replace it with this cable. Similar to yours, just a little cheaper.

http://www.priceguidenetwork.com/computer-component/supermicro-ac-cbl-0097l-02-50cm-ipass-to-4-sata-cable-pb-free.html

Let me know if you want the exact layout and the parts that I used in my setup.

Thanks for the tip. This is a great solution, cause it gives you 4 drives in RAID and 4 more bootable SATA/eSATA connections.

How does that look like cable-wise? The iPass cable ends with SATA connectors that allow you to connect a SATA drive (=female). The SATA to eSATA brackets that I find on the web are all SATA connectors for the motherboard (again female) to eSATA.

Does this mean you need an additional SATA male to male adapter to connect those cables?

What is the impact on reliability with so many connectors between the board and the eSATA drive? (I count 5: iPass, adapter in, adapter out, eSATA bracket, eSATA drive).

[nanofrog]

Thanks for the tip. This is a great solution, cause it gives you 4 drives in RAID and 4 more bootable SATA/eSATA connections.

How does that look like cable-wise? The iPass cable ends with SATA connectors that allow you to connect a SATA drive (=female). The SATA to eSATA brackets that I find on the web are all SATA connectors for the motherboard (again female) to eSATA.

Does this mean you need an additional SATA male to male adapter to connect those cables?

What is the impact on reliability with so many connectors between the board and the eSATA drive? (I count 5: iPass, adapter in, adapter out, eSATA bracket, eSATA drive).
If you're looking for a card that will work, there's better options than Apple's offering. Faster, and they work with multiple OS's, and some will boot multiple OS's as well. Take a look at Areca or Atto Technologies. Highpoint's RR43xx may be an option as well, though this one only holds firmware for EFI or BIOS, not both. You have to select which OS you want to boot with (BIOS by default), and flash the EFI boot portion if you want to boot it on a MP.

As per the logic board to eSATA, they do make a cable that eliminates the need for adapters (SFF-8087 to 4*eSATA). They're hard to find, but they do exist. The internal versions (SFF-8087 <you only need 26 pin connection, but the 36 will work as well> to 4i*SATA (http://www.provantage.com/tripp-lite-s508-18n~7TRPA1U3.htm)) are easier to find. They'll also work, but may not have a latch on them (or if it does, IIRC they're different).

In either event, you'd want to skip the adapters if at all possible, as they tend to make the drive/s unstable. Also keep the wiring (total of internal and external) to 1.0m., as I must assume your solution is passive (i.e. an external enclosure that uses 1 eSATA port per drive, which has no active electronics). Active signals can go up to 2.0m. though, and a Port Multiplier enclosure is active via the PM chip on the board. But they do run slower (250MB/s max throughput).

[65StangBoy]

Thanks for the tip. This is a great solution, cause it gives you 4 drives in RAID and 4 more bootable SATA/eSATA connections.

How does that look like cable-wise? The iPass cable ends with SATA connectors that allow you to connect a SATA drive (=female). The SATA to eSATA brackets that I find on the web are all SATA connectors for the motherboard (again female) to eSATA.

Does this mean you need an additional SATA male to male adapter to connect those cables?

What is the impact on reliability with so many connectors between the board and the eSATA drive? (I count 5: iPass, adapter in, adapter out, eSATA bracket, eSATA drive).

Yeah, there are a lot of connections in my setup. I absolutely intended on getting a longer cable so that I could get rid of my extensions, but honestly I've had zero problems with the current setup. If I don't upgrade to a new Mac Pro in the near future I will probably upgrade my cables and go to Infiniband for the connection to the eSata enclosure.

[nanofrog]

Yeah, there are a lot of connections in my setup. I absolutely intended on getting a longer cable so that I could get rid of my extensions, but honestly I've had zero problems with the current setup. If I don't upgrade to a new Mac Pro in the near future I will probably upgrade my cables and go to Infiniband for the connection to the eSata enclosure.
What did you keep the cable length to, and what is it attached to (i.e. PM enclosure, or something else)?

[65StangBoy]

What did you keep the cable length to, and what is it attached to (i.e. PM enclosure, or something else)?

I have everything disconnected right now as I'm moving so I'm not entirely sure about the length, but I'd say that I'm definitely beyond 1m. It's hooked up to a 4-Bay Hotswap enclosure. It's not PM or anything, there's just 4 eSata ports on the back that connect to the individual drive sleds. So even more connections inside the drive enclosure.

Now that I think back, I did have to jumper my drives to 1.5Gbit/s as they weren't being detected @ 3.0Gbit/s. I'm sure that's because of all the connections/terminations. Drive performance is the same as it was when I had them inside the computer.

[nanofrog]

I have everything disconnected right now as I'm moving so I'm not entirely sure about the length, but I'd say that I'm definitely beyond 1m. It's hooked up to a 4-Bay Hotswap enclosure. It's not PM or anything, there's just 4 eSata ports on the back that connect to the individual drive sleds. So even more connections inside the drive enclosure.

Now that I think back, I did have to jumper my drives to 1.5Gbit/s as they weren't being detected @ 3.0Gbit/s. I'm sure that's because of all the connections/terminations. Drive performance is the same as it was when I had them inside the computer.
At least it's working for you. :D

Length and contact resistance (multiple connectors) can cause issues to outright failures, and if a user isn't aware of the possibility, will drive them absolutely crazy. :( It's caused problems when the lengths were within specs on the SAS adapters used with a RAID card. It ended up finding a special order cable to make it work (air cargo directly from China :eek:). Now that cable is more available. :rolleyes:

[MacInMotion]

Length and contact resistance (multiple connectors) can cause issues to outright failures, and if a user isn't aware of the possibility, will drive them absolutely crazy. :( It's caused problems when the lengths were within specs on the SAS adapters used with a RAID card.

I had cable length problems, too. I had initially used a 24 inch (0.7 meter) iPass to SATA cable attached to a (passive) SATA to eSATA bracket, into which I plugged 1 meter eSATA cables which in turn were connected to basic eSATA enclosures. This setup worked with only intermittent failures when I had only one eSATA enclosure plugged in and failed consistently when I had more than one plugged in.

While eSATA specifies up to 2 meters of cable, it's important to remember that the iPass is providing SATA connections, not eSATA connections, regardless of what kind of plug/cable/adapter you use, and SATA connections are only spec'd to 1 meter total cable length.

I have since switched to a 0.5 meter iPass to SATA cable (fits the Mac perfectly) and 0.5 meter eSATA cables (tough to find at the time, but not impossible) and all is good now when using 2 eSATA enclosures. Haven't had the need to try more than 2.

[nanofrog]

While eSATA specifies up to 2 meters of cable, it's important to remember that the iPass is providing SATA connections, not eSATA connections, regardless of what kind of plug/cable/adapter you use, and SATA connections are only spec'd to 1 meter total cable length.
There's two parts to the specification though.
Passive = 1.0 m
Active = 2.0 m

The logic board to an eSATA bracket is passive. If it's attached directly to a drive it will remain passive, so the maximum cable length is still 1.0 m. But if there's active electronics (powered) between the eSATA port and the drive itself, then it's an active implementation. A Port Multiplier enclosure is such an example, as that little board has it's own power (typically attached to the enclusures PSU via a 4 pin Molex connector), allowing it to "stabilize" the signal, thus allowing the additional distance of 2.0 m.

It can be a little confusing, and it's not explained well on wiki (no examples to explain the differences between passive and active), let alone eSATA device vendors. :eek: :(