Highpoint Raid card in Macpro?

[sejanus]

hey guys

I have a macpro with 4 x 1tb drives

Is it possible to get a highpoint raid controller and put those 4 drives in a raid 5 array (and then create partitions inside that array) - or do you need to have 1 drive by itself for the operating system, and then create a raid array using the remaining 3 drives?

Lastly, are the highpoint 3500 series a decent card? and fully compatible?

The apple raid card is very pricey.

cheers

 

[offshoresa65s]

Hi

This might help: www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/highpoint/3522/

This card gets 4 1/2 MUGS

I use HP RR 2314 eSATA card and use it conjunction with a Firmtek 5 Bay PM Enclosure and have no difficulties. It uses an interesting browser based management tool. This enables you to create RAID Arrays be it level 0, 1, 5 and so on. You can also use Mac's Disk utility to create RAID level 1 & 0 if you prefer.

I only have one 5 Bay enclosure filled with 5 x WD 500GB AAKKs drives and Set up for level RAID 0. I'd like to have level RAID 5 but can't afford another 5 Bay Enclosure because if I went for level RAID level 5 I'd take a performance hit of approx 20%.

More hard drives = more speed and greater redundancy, read this other AMUG review of the 5 Bay enclosure: www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/firmtek/5pm/

It illistrates the performance of several different cards with different combinations of enclosures and the shows the peformance hit you take when you go for greater redundancy.

Anyway, good luck

O

Mac Pro 2.8 GHZ (jan 2008)

 

[sejanus]

Can the card manage the internal drives or is it mandatory to use external?

 

[offshoresa65s]

My take on this is, if you want internal RAID you maybe limited to an Apple RAID card, or then you can get into Fibre Channel cards also made by Apple.

I'm not sure if either of the Apple RAID or Fibre Channel cards do RAID level 5 and greater. (Fibre channel might?)

I went with the external option as while internal HDD's in your Mac might be convienient, for mine, it was all about expandability.

For RAID level 5 you must have a minimum of 3 HDD's, it's been a long time since I've seen specs on Transfer / Read / Write speeds of internal RAID setups within a Mac, but from memory, if you do some searching I think that you'll find those specs aren't that great compared to external soloutions. Just My Opinion.

Also consider what your needs are. I've moved from SD Video Production to HDV production, while I'd love to have some redundancy with a RAID 5 setup, with only a 5 drive enclosure I'd take a speed hit, so I'm using RAID 0.

The HP RR 2314 card that I have enables me the flexibility of creating a RAID Level 5 now if I wanted to, but I'm holding off until I can afford to have another 5 bay enclosure.

It's all about what your card can do.

Within the first week of my setup I lost a hard drive, wouldn't spin, wouldn't do anything. Makes me a bit nervous having lost one HDD already. Still brings home the necessity of backing up projects.

I'm new to RAID setups really, but have ben searching the topic for months prior to buying my nice new MacPro. I've said this before on this forum, but final cost for a 2.3TB RAID Array has worked out to about $0.30 / GB.

Good Luck

O