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Mac Pro RAID Card Installation

Transeau,

Can you inform me if the card is an X4 or X8 PCI Express lane. The utility should be in System/Library/CoreServices/Expansion slot Utility

I have an AJA Kona LHe PCI Express 4x card in the top slot currently (figure will move it to the third slot). Trying to figure out how I will configure the slots. So far its looking like X4, X4, X1 and X16.
 
trancepriest said:
Transeau,

Can you inform me if the card is an X4 or X8 PCI Express lane. The utility should be in System/Library/CoreServices/Expansion slot Utility

I have an AJA Kona LHe PCI Express 4x card in the top slot currently (figure will move it to the third slot). Trying to figure out how I will configure the slots. So far its looking like X4, X4, X1 and X16.
Click to expand...

The card has an x8 interface, so the proper configuration is x16/x1/x1/x8. However, if you are not doing 3D graphics, you will want to reconfigure the slots for x8/x8/x1/x8 (Config Option 3).

The RAID Card MUST be in slot 4. It's not an interface requirement, but a cable requirement. The iPass cable will NOT reach any other slot. So, you would move the AJA Kona LHe to slot 2, and have the video card reduces to x8. Still plenty of bandwidth for HD video, just not 3D games.
 
Transeau said:
The card has an x8 interface, so the proper configuration is x16/x1/x1/x8. However, if you are not doing 3D graphics, you will want to reconfigure the slots for x8/x8/x1/x8 (Config Option 3).

The RAID Card MUST be in slot 4. It's not an interface requirement, but a cable requirement. The iPass cable will NOT reach any other slot. So, you would move the AJA Kona LHe to slot 2, and have the video card reduces to x8. Still plenty of bandwidth for HD video, just not 3D games.
Click to expand...

Can you also check About This Mac... PCI Cards... Mac Pro RAId.. Link Width.. to confirm the X8 requirement. X8 seems excessive bandwidth for the card... 2000MBps. Even with 4 SAS drives the sustained mac throughput would be around 656MBps.
 
trancepriest said:
Can you also check About This Mac... PCI Cards... Mac Pro RAId.. Link Width.. to confirm the X8 requirement. X8 seems excessive bandwidth for the card... 2000MBps. Even with 4 SAS drives the sustained mac throughput would be around 656MBps.
Click to expand...

Code: 
Apple RAID Card:

  Name:	pci106b,8a
  Type:	RAID Controller
  Bus:	PCI
  Slot:	Slot-4
  Vendor ID:	0x106b
  Device ID:	0x008a
  Subsystem Vendor ID:	0x0004
  Subsystem ID:	0x0000
  Revision ID:	0x0064
  Link Width:	x8

It is a bit much, but remember it does have that 256M cache that can dump it's contents to the system that fast. You may want to try from benchmarks with it in x4 and x8 mode
 
Transeau said:
It is a bit much, but remember it does have that 256M cache that can dump it's contents to the system that fast. You may want to try from benchmarks with it in x4 and x8 mode
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info.. guess I will have to take away from the graphics card.... i kinda hate doing that.. but no other config solution.
 
Okay, I think this is my last remaining major bitch about the card.

The box will no longer sleep. I'm hoping that this is fixed at some point.
 
Installed the card... battery is charging... hopefully it will be done by tomorrow morning. It was such a pain to extend the cable.. I had to unscrew the SATA port to pull more of the cable out. Did you guys let it stay on the Leopard RAID utility screen... while charging? I have 2 systems so I didn't mind the down time... didn't want to go back in just to connect the iPass cable.

Install pics: http://tweetl.com/2g8

Transeau said:
Okay, I think this is my last remaining major bitch about the card.

The box will no longer sleep. I'm hoping that this is fixed at some point.
Click to expand...

I guess we are beta testers... hopefully firmware update will solve all problems.
 
A side note that may be important to note for other memebers who are interested in the RAID card config and run boot camp:

I decided to buy my 1st MAC pro with Raid card on it. Turned out the windows xp sp2 CD did not recognize the hard drive. I hate apple did not warn RAID card not compatible with Boot camp and regret about it.

Could I add a 2nd SATA card and drive to run boot camp in this case?

Thanks
 
beanlee said:
A side note that may be important to note for other memebers who are interested in the RAID card config and run boot camp:

I decided to buy my 1st MAC pro with Raid card on it. Turned out the windows xp sp2 CD did not recognize the hard drive. I hate apple did not warn RAID card not compatible with Boot camp and regret about it.

Could I add a 2nd SATA card and drive to run boot camp in this case?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Your best bet is to install an eSATA cable from NewerTech.
http://www.newertech.com/products/esata_cable.php

You can then use an external SATA drive for bootcamp.
 
It's 2:23 AM and the battery is charged. Took about 10 hours or less to charge. Sorry you had so much issues with yours Transeau. I hope its not a sign that you have a messed up battery.

On another note... I wasn't able to migrate any of my volumes to a new set. Before i had a single JBOD and 3 drive RAID 0. I was hoping to migrate the JBOD to a RAID 5 set. I'm in Disk Utility making a backup image of the JBOD which is my OS drive.
 
Per what Transeau reported on the slow initializing process: After you create the RAID SET you then have to Create a new Volume by formatting it and the initializing process starts after that. You have to do this for the system to recognize the drives. It seems like a process that will take all day on my 4x750GB drives. A thing I was disappointed by was the lack of available space... out of 2794.56 GB I only have 1.78 available on a RAID 5 set. I was hoping for around 2.25TB with about one drives space for parity... its definitely taking up about a TB for parity.
 
termina3 said:
That seems long to me... I dunno much, though

Also interesting how it wouldn't let you migrate one drive right into a RAID 5... it seems like Apple has some bugs to work out here.
Click to expand...

Apple only allows you to migrate a single-disk Enhanced JBOD RAID set. Basically a single drive that they configure with the RAID Card on their end if you purchase the BTO option.

http://images.apple.com/server/docs/RAID_Utility_User_Guide.pdf

As for the initializing time... I guess its normal after what Transeau reported on his 160GB drives taking 2 hours.
 
Further SAS controller proof.

2028138052_92ecb5839c_o.png
 
trancepriest said:
Per what Transeau reported on the slow initializing process: After you create the RAID SET you then have to Create a new Volume by formatting it and the initializing process starts after that. You have to do this for the system to recognize the drives. It seems like a process that will take all day on my 4x750GB drives. A thing I was disappointed by was the lack of available space... out of 2794.56 GB I only have 1.78 available on a RAID 5 set. I was hoping for around 2.25TB with about one drives space for parity... its definitely taking up about a TB for parity.
Click to expand...

That's about right. You lose 1/3 of your total to the parity stripe.
 
termina3 said:
That seems long to me... I dunno much, though

Also interesting how it wouldn't let you migrate one drive right into a RAID 5... it seems like Apple has some bugs to work out here.
Click to expand...
The time to migrate is normal for a controller without a "Fast Init" feature. Some controllers allow you to do the initialization in a very low priority, but that leaves the volume prone to errors for up to a week.

As for the migration, that's also normal. You can migrate a single volume PLUS 3 EMPTY drives to a RAID-5, but if there is anyone on the other 3, you are out of luck.
 
Transeau said:
As for the migration, that's also normal. You can migrate a single volume PLUS 3 EMPTY drives to a RAID-5, but if there is anyone on the other 3, you are out of luck.
Click to expand...

Also that first volume has to be a single-disk enhanced JBOD configured at the factory with a Mac PRO RAID Card BTO. I wasn't able to migrate my system drive. I had to do a disk image of my System HD in diskutil and then restore it on to the fresh RAID 5 volume.... luckily it worked... sometimes that's kind of tricky with diskutil.
 
trancepriest said:
LOL... I wonder what the migrate time would have been.. took me 13 hours to init it.
Click to expand...

Well, you have to remember that migrating requires the system to resize the partition to jsut fit the data, create a new RAID volume, start moving the data, as it shrinks the old and expands the new. (Yes, that was WAY over simplified, but I didn't want to confuse the RAID newbies) :p
 
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