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MacACK

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 26, 2009
15
0
I picked up one of the DX4 adapters from Maxupgrades - and it holds my 4 SSDs beautifully. Now I am looking for a host adapter that I can connect all 4 to create a Strip and boot off of.

I am currently using a Sonnet E4i but it doesnt support booting...

My Christmas wish: an internal SATA host adapter that allows booting and works with snow leopard. Does anyone have any recommendations to help this come true?

Thanks
MA
 

MacACK

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 26, 2009
15
0
I returned your PM about the ARC-1210. Its a recommendation.

Thank you for getting back to me! In your private message you mentioned the boot time for the EFI took longer than SW Raid - is it painfully slower? Or just in the range of 20-30 seconds more?

Is the system able to goto sleep with this card?

One last question, I dont see any mention of SL support on the Areca website - but was able to find some SL support drives on their FTP site - possibly beta.. Was there any difficulties with drivers or getting this installed?

Thank you!
MA
 

gugucom

macrumors 68020
May 21, 2009
2,136
2
Munich, Germany
you mentioned the boot time for the EFI took longer than SW Raid - is it painfully slower? Or just in the range of 20-30 seconds more?

It is in that range. It is actually different in OS X and Windows. OS X takes a long time to log out while Windows takes more time to boot.


Is the system able to goto sleep with this card?

I havn't noticed any problems there but I don't sleep my Mac Pro much. I do a lot of satellite recording with EyeTV and keep the machine running most of the time. What hurts me a lot is the Quicktime bug that makes my machine run a lot hotter than it needs to be and use much more energy than I would like.


One last question, I dont see any mention of SL support on the Areca website - but was able to find some SL support drives on their FTP site - possibly beta.. Was there any difficulties with drivers or getting this installed?

They actually differentiate between K64 and K32 if I remember right. The SL K32 drivers are identical to Leopard. I havn't checked Windows lately when I switched K32 to K64.

I agree that the download page of Areca is crap. I usually use the German distributer's page http://www.Starline.de
 

MacACK

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 26, 2009
15
0
Thank you for your help!

Installed the 1210 today - and it works perfectly. I expected the install to be more complicated/troublesome than it actually was because of the shabby state of their website and the relative lack of installation directions geared towards Mac users....

But it was as simple as can be... Installed card and connect drives... Installed Drivers... Flashed with Mac EFI... done.

I have it connected to 4 OCZ Vertex 250 SSDs Raid 0 using the MaxUpgrades DX4 chasis. Real slick combination - and performance is amazing. I am using the SSD Raid as my boot drive and for all applications.

No issues with Snow Leopard 10.6.2 using latest drivers and bios.


MA
 

nanofrog

macrumors G4
May 6, 2008
11,719
3
Is the system able to goto sleep with this card?
No. It's an issue with any true hardware RAID controller. The reason is simple. The OS has control of the sleep function, but not the drives. That aspect is now under the control of the card, and it CANNOT be powered down by the OS (sleep kills power to the card, as it doesn't have access to power saving controls/features).

To save on power, the card has a feature called MAID (specifically, the ARC-1210 supports this). It allows the card to spin down drives that haven't been used for a period of time you set.
 

Transporteur

macrumors 68030
Nov 30, 2008
2,729
3
UK
That's a really nice solution for adding another 4TB or a fast SSD array.

Thanks to the great video (and of course thanks to gugucom for posting it) I finally got the idea of how to remove the PCI fan.
 

gugucom

macrumors 68020
May 21, 2009
2,136
2
Munich, Germany
That's a really nice solution for adding another 4TB or a fast SSD array.

I would buy the PCIe bay power cable anytime. It is a much better solution than routing power back from the ODD bay. BTW, the cable which they say in the video to feeds power to the logic board actually takes the power from the logic board to the ODD bay. The monolithic power connector for the PSU-> logic board sits under the bulk head that separates the ODD bay and the PCIe bay.
 
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