Nanofrog...
You sound like you have extensive experience with the card. What kind of troubles have you've encountered? Any major flaws?
I've worked with RAID for many years, and got into a situation of helping another member who purchased the CalDigit card. It even got to the point that I was speaking directly to one of CalDigit's engineers about what was going on. Simply put, he and his system became the proverbial guinea pig.
To give a quick summary of the setup. Late 2008 Mac Pro, separate OS drive, CalDigit RAID Card, and HDElement enclosures. A single array was created (RAID 5) spanning the internal and external drives. It kept dropping out randomly, and the array would actually be lost. Permanently.
In the phone discussion, I discovered that this particular card does not have a backup of the Partition Tables. A big no-no, IMO. The reason is, if there's a problem, this backup can allow you to restore the array. Without it, you might be able to rebuild it by hand, but that takes a while, and there's no guarantees it will work. (Method of last resort, and the reason RAID requires proper backups). Data can still be lost.
CalDigit was indicating it was having issues with Apple's implementation of EFI, and OS updates, that resulted in lost arrays and data as well.
All in all, it didn't leave me with a lot of confidence overall, and it was
obvious that it released prematurely. Just not enough testing.
I do believe that if used internally only, it would be OK. The same may be true for external only, but I haven't seen that setup myself. I would not recommend trying to span an array over both internal and external drives.
Unfortunately, given the way it was designed, it seems reasonable to assume that this others would want to go this route.
Cause I've been using it for a while now as a internal scratch disk under RAID5 and so far I've yet to experience anything negative besides you have to buy into their extension boxes if an expansion is required. My card didn't come with the bootcamp cable but who really needs it?
Internally, with a separate OS drive would be OK I should think. No timing issues with powering the equipment up.
Nah, I think they're clearing their inventory of CalDighit RAIDCards that come without the Battery. Personally, I think this config is only useful if you have an UPS installed. The other thing I've noticed, shutting down the system takes a while longer if there's no battery installed...
I have no idea about the Apple cards, simply because I didn't go with them.. their cards are slow and in a word, "crap".
From what I can tell, the battery is still not included, nor do I think it will be. Accessories can generate additional income.
With RAID, a UPS should always be used IMO. Just too much of a chance for major issues without it.
My guess, is that they aren't moving the volume of cards they thought they would, and the economy isn't helping matters.
Apple's card is junk. Not only slow, but the battery design is crap. I've never seen a battery cause the problems being described with this card.
Personally, other offerings can do better, and possibly at less money, depending on specific needs.
