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.
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Mac Pro RAID Card Installation
- Thread starter Transeau
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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.
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.
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.
Thanks.
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
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.
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 thisif anyone else is, this site (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/multXY-c.html) is helpful.
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!
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.
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)
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)
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)
On the RAID 5 speed tests were all 4 bays populated? Also what drives were you using?
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!
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!
Yes, I was using the same four Western Digital 160GB "RE16" Drives for the RAID-5 tests. (7200RPM, 160GB, 16MB Cache, Multidrive firmware)
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.
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?
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.
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.