Like many others, I am waiting on a new Mac Pro to ship. Not wanting to spend more than I have to, I got the stock 320G drive and plan to buy other drives externally, likely the Samsung F1 750G in regular or raid version. My original plan was to buy two of those and run them in RAID 0, then use the existing 320G drive as a boot camp drive. As I have such a long wait time, I keep going over it in my head and now I am thinking of getting 4 drives and running software RAID 0+1 or 1+0 and installing the stock 320G drive on one of the eSATA ports, possibly in the spare optical slot or externally. What I am wondering, and am not sure this has been answered elsewhere entirely, is will I be able to use boot camp to boot from the eSATA 320G drive as I will be using the on board eSATA ports rather than an external card? Also, are there any advantages in using RAID 1+0 over RAID 0+1 besides less redundancy? And is one faster than the other? Also, with this setup would I take too much of a hit using software RAID and should I perhaps consider the RAID card? (I am not made of money but I could probably add this later) Finally, if I can't use boot camp from the board eSATA (and I am assuming can't use it with this RAID configuration) is there a way to use it at all or will I need to go with my original RAID 0 plan and backup externally to time machine? I am aware that a lot of this is preference, but I am looking for some technical reasons that tend to back up preference.
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Another RAID question combined with eSATA
- Thread starter hollowsphere
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The mobos sata slots dont show under the bootcamp and I have a faint recollection that with eSata cards you have problems/cant boot in bootcamp too. And neither does the software raid show up on windows side.
So get a external FW disk for that. Partition in 2 : 1 part for bootcamp and 1 to make a disk image of your raid10/0+1 with carbon copy cloner if you would have to restore your stuff due some hickup or if you want to test how the OS X updated affect your system/programs.That is how I did it.
Under software raid the speed difference is apparently small/nonexistant between 10 and 0+1. Between software raid and raid card there is speed difference,but I personally havent seen any benchmarks. I could guess some 10-20% differences? I.A. 150Mb/s vs. 160-170Mb/s. Wich I would say is no dealbreaker,if it would be in that class. Obviusly,if you are loaded and dont know what to do with that extra 900$,you can buy it. Or if you need that battery provided redundacy.
Otherwise,buy other stuff with that money.
could you use a EIDE drive for Boot Camp?
If you can't use the eSATA expansion ports for Boot Camp, can you still put an extra EIDE drive in the optical drive bay and connect it to the second connector on the parallel DVD drive cable and use that to boot windows/bootcamp?
-howard
If you can't use the eSATA expansion ports for Boot Camp, can you still put an extra EIDE drive in the optical drive bay and connect it to the second connector on the parallel DVD drive cable and use that to boot windows/bootcamp?
-howard
Hmm, I suppose external FW is an option but would it measure up to eSATA? I should clarify, the only reason I even want to use boot camp (rather than just a virtualization scenario) is that with this mac purchase I am finally getting rid of my PC running windows altogether (before I had both a PC and a dual 1.25 MDD mac) and I want to have to option to do gaming on the mac using boot camp should I so decide. That would be my primary use (not for the mac of course, but for boot camp) so I want to get the best performance. Also, as I was considering RAID 1+0 with 4 750G drives, I would probably need a fairly large external FW drive...
If you are using the PC side mainly for gaming,the FW400/800 wont be an issue. FW800 and eSata is about on par on single disk transfer speeds. Only if you have some 4-6 disk raidboxes externally,then the eSata comes handy.
And you can decide what you copy to your FW disk with CCC. I have there only my system setup and programs,about 50GB. All my media backed up on either on arcive disks (usb2) or in the internal bay5 disk. So if the ***** hits the fan and the raid goes down, i can continue to work normally. Just the last 1-2 hours of work might go down the drain.
And with a raid10 I can continue to work untill I get the spare in and build my system back.
Hmm okay, that sounds like a nice deal. That being the case then, if I got an external enclosure that would allow me to use the stock sata 320G drive and connect to it via FW800 (as I see some enclosures offer) then could I use that for boot camp?