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Mac Pro RAID Card Installation

Thanks for the pictures! That is great info! It really does seem like the only way to go if you want boot camp with a RAID card installed.

Ahhh here's where I will have a problem, since I have a RAID card and SAS drives, I won't be able to put the drive in the Mac first. I might be able to find another Mac to do it on. I'm going to see what my options are when I try next week and let you know (I'm sure you'll be holding your breath LOL). Seriously, thanks for the explanation!
Click to expand...

hmmmmm I am also on the same boat. Last time I tried to install bootcamp to an external firewire hard drive it gave me an error that it just wasn't possible by the installer.

Now, the interesting part is that a firewire drive of course can't be put inside a mac, well not without opening the enclusure anyway... It seems we will have to find a way to install boot camp into the drive before putting it into the esata enclosure. The only way obivous to me to do this would be to uninstall the RAID card and do that inside the mac, to later reinstall the RAID card. But to be honest, I would rather look at other options than uninstalling the ipass cable to later install it again, it gave me too many headaches...

mac
 
why not remove one

I know very little about the raid card since I dont have one but why cant you remove one hard drive temporarily? Also, I have to know, Is your raid card with sas drives amazing in performance? Like in regular stuff you know booting and opening apps copying and moving. Is it worth it?
 
mikekim75 said:
I know very little about the raid card since I dont have one but why cant you remove one hard drive temporarily? Also, I have to know, Is your raid card with sas drives amazing in performance? Like in regular stuff you know booting and opening apps copying and moving. Is it worth it?
Click to expand...

Hmmmm well, I have a RAID 5 with 4 drives setup, which means I can take one out and still run the RAID (degraded). I didn't attempt this because I know bootcamp will not boot with a drive attached to this card.... However I don't know if it is possible to install boot camp in a drive, just to later unplug it and then plug it in to an eSATA controller.... hmmmm maybe it is worth a try.

As for RAID performance, I didn't install SAS drives, but rather 750GB SATA ones.


I do have some complains:

  1. This has been said before, the card takes around a day to charge up. I went on vacation and left it off but plugged in and it took a whole day to charge up again once it booted.
  2. Also, you can put the Mac pro to sleep, the RAID just doesn't turn off... at all. Which I guess is ok, bootup time is very little anyway.
  3. The major one is bootcamp. You pretty much kiss goodbye bootcamp functionality (Or at least until I try your set up). But this is more related to bootcamp rather than the RAID card, because I wouldn't want bootcamp drives connected to my RAID anyway. My original idea was to have bootcamp on an external drive... but you know how that went. A mac Pro is an excellent windows machine! I had Windows XP 64 installed before I installed the RAID card and it was great!

Now the sweet stuff:

  1. Performance is great, I boot from the RAID and it is definitely faster than before (had a 750GB Hitachi drive), it is around 2 to 3 times faster to boot and definitely much less noisy (because of activity AND new drives.. see below). Also, I have a photoshop scratch disk setup in the RAID and I can work on 4k x 4k images with 3 or 4 other major apps open with NO lags (but then again this also because of RAM installed).
  2. I bought server-grade drives and they are ultra-quiet! no problem in there!
  3. With a RAID 5 setup one of your drives can go up in flames and you still can keep on truckin': same space available, all your files there, although a little slower, but hey, much better than losing a volume all of a sudden!
  4. But where this really shines is in HD Quicktime playback. Can work on 1920 x 1080 movies and the system doesn't sweat. This is still with some highly compressed videos, but there are some video compression cards out there that will let you increase quality up to broadcasting standards... and that is very sweet. I still have to see any experiences with SAS drives, but that would be definitely faster than my setup (and noisier).

Overall, a great experience! But wouldn't recommend it for other than video editing. I don't think it is worth it if you only do Word docs, mail and web-surfing. Even if you do photo editing, I think you would be served better off by more RAM than a RAID. Also, even if you have a lot of apps open, you would be better off if you have more RAM. But then again, that is just my opinion.

mac, happy RAID card owner
 
mikekim75 said:
I know very little about the raid card since I dont have one but why cant you remove one hard drive temporarily? Also, I have to know, Is your raid card with sas drives amazing in performance? Like in regular stuff you know booting and opening apps copying and moving. Is it worth it?
Click to expand...
You can't mix SAS and SATA drives with the RAID card so I won't be able to pull one drive to set up the SATA drive. :(
on the performance question.... I don't have my Mac Pro yet (I ordered Jan 18th) but I will give a detailed report when it arrives.
 
Mac Raid Questions

i just got my new mac pro and i wanted to do RAID 5 with 4 750gb hard drives. Im new to RAID and i want to make sure i dont screw anything up. Luckly the raid card came installed. It shows as the RAID card is charged, what should i do next?
Remove the original 320gb hard drive and put the 4 new 750gb?
 
I'm having troubles with the Apple Pro RAID card and WD Caviar RE2 (WD7500AYYS). I just can't initialize any kind of RAID with these HDD - Either RAID utility reports an error (disk about to fail, etc), either the disk is reported as removed after a short while then the corresponding bay is said empty. I've tried with three different disks to no avail (the fourth being DOA). All three behave the same.
By now, I'm stuck with the 320 Gb drive that shipped with the machine (Seagate), and because that's the only drive I have at hand, I can't say whether the problem is with the RAID card that is unable to initialize them for some reason, or the WD HDD (as a side note, two of them arrived with a noticeable bump on the enclosure, including the DOA one, so maybe the other two are not healthy either).

Any experience with the same combination is welcomed, as are advices on what to buy next to be on a safe path.
Thank you.
 
mariconson said:
Remove the original 320gb hard drive and put the 4 new 750gb?
Click to expand...

That is what I would do and then just put the Leopard CD in and reinstall. It's going to take a while though for the drives to get "initialized" 4x750 should take, I imagine over 1/2 a day to complete.
 
kakace said:
I'm having troubles with the Apple Pro RAID card and WD Caviar RE2 (WD7500AYYS). (...)
Click to expand...
Update -
I've bought another disk yesterday (WD Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS), and I experienced the very same troubles. RAID Utility was still marking the disk as Enhanced JBOD for more than 6 hours when I decided to restart. No RAID created, no volume to format, nothing. That disk no longer appear, in any bay I tried.
I finally pulled the RAID card and reconnected the iPass connector to the motherboard. Out of five WD drives, only two WD7500AYYS still appear in disk utility. Any attempt to erase them leads disk utility to keep "writing the partition map" for ever. In short, all five WD drives appear to be dead.

I don't know how to bring them back online, if that is even possible. I'm starting to think the RAID card is actually killing them for some reason. The Seagate that shipped with the MP appears to work fine though. But I didn't try to format it then mark it for enhanced JBOD again. So there's either something wrong in how the RAID card deal with WD drives (killing them in the process), or the RAID card itself is broken and I'm kind of lucky the Seagate drive works...

Guess it's time to call AppleCare :mad:
 
mac666er said:
Hmmmm well, I have a RAID 5 with 4 drives setup, which means I can take one out and still run the RAID (degraded). I didn't attempt this because I know bootcamp will not boot with a drive attached to this card.... However I don't know if it is possible to install boot camp in a drive, just to later unplug it and then plug it in to an eSATA controller.... hmmmm maybe it is worth a try.

As for RAID performance, I didn't install SAS drives, but rather 750GB SATA ones.


I do have some complains:

  1. This has been said before, the card takes around a day to charge up. I went on vacation and left it off but plugged in and it took a whole day to charge up again once it booted.
  2. Also, you can put the Mac pro to sleep, the RAID just doesn't turn off... at all. Which I guess is ok, bootup time is very little anyway.
  3. The major one is bootcamp. You pretty much kiss goodbye bootcamp functionality (Or at least until I try your set up). But this is more related to bootcamp rather than the RAID card, because I wouldn't want bootcamp drives connected to my RAID anyway. My original idea was to have bootcamp on an external drive... but you know how that went. A mac Pro is an excellent windows machine! I had Windows XP 64 installed before I installed the RAID card and it was great!

Now the sweet stuff:

  1. Performance is great, I boot from the RAID and it is definitely faster than before (had a 750GB Hitachi drive), it is around 2 to 3 times faster to boot and definitely much less noisy (because of activity AND new drives.. see below). Also, I have a photoshop scratch disk setup in the RAID and I can work on 4k x 4k images with 3 or 4 other major apps open with NO lags (but then again this also because of RAM installed).
  2. I bought server-grade drives and they are ultra-quiet! no problem in there!
  3. With a RAID 5 setup one of your drives can go up in flames and you still can keep on truckin': same space available, all your files there, although a little slower, but hey, much better than losing a volume all of a sudden!
  4. But where this really shines is in HD Quicktime playback. Can work on 1920 x 1080 movies and the system doesn't sweat. This is still with some highly compressed videos, but there are some video compression cards out there that will let you increase quality up to broadcasting standards... and that is very sweet. I still have to see any experiences with SAS drives, but that would be definitely faster than my setup (and noisier).

Overall, a great experience! But wouldn't recommend it for other than video editing. I don't think it is worth it if you only do Word docs, mail and web-surfing. Even if you do photo editing, I think you would be served better off by more RAM than a RAID. Also, even if you have a lot of apps open, you would be better off if you have more RAM. But then again, that is just my opinion.

mac, happy RAID card owner
Click to expand...

mac,

Thanks for this info, very helpful. I am waiting for my new MP to arrive (Friday hopefully!). It will have OSX Server and the Mac RAID card with 4x1TB drives. Supposedly, apple ships the OS installed on Drive 1 and all drives are JBOD initially. I am leaning toward config'ing all 4 drives in a RAID5 for the reasons you mention. Can I ask, did you just set up one massive RAID5 volume, or did you create separate volumes for OS/apps, scratch, backup, etc.? Any advice you can give, let me know. I obviously know about the initial battery charge thing and then the coversion of 4TB of drive space in JBOD to RAID5 will likely take a LONG time, but that's fine. Just anything you can think of, let me know.

I truly appreciate it....let's keep this thread going with each of our various experiences with RAID, because there is a dirth of info out there right now on this.

Cheers!
Brian
 
kakace said:
I'm having troubles with the Apple Pro RAID card and WD Caviar RE2 (WD7500AYYS). I just can't initialize any kind of RAID with these HDD - Either RAID utility reports an error (disk about to fail, etc), either the disk is reported as removed after a short while then the corresponding bay is said empty. I've tried with three different disks to no avail (the fourth being DOA). All three behave the same.
By now, I'm stuck with the 320 Gb drive that shipped with the machine (Seagate), and because that's the only drive I have at hand, I can't say whether the problem is with the RAID card that is unable to initialize them for some reason, or the WD HDD (as a side note, two of them arrived with a noticeable bump on the enclosure, including the DOA one, so maybe the other two are not healthy either).

Any experience with the same combination is welcomed, as are advices on what to buy next to be on a safe path.
Thank you.
Click to expand...

Hmmmmm I should have replied earlier. When I installed the RAID card I bought 3 additional 750GB WD caviar drives, just the ones you bought. And put them together with the hitachi drive that came with my mac (also 750 GB). Please note that this is not recommended in general, why? because I bought three drives from the same brand and unless you are really lucky you will receive them all from the same batch (i.e. drives that were manufactured closely together, same factory, same assembly line, etc.) the problem with this is that if a drive fails because of a manufacturing defect what do you think your chances are that the other drives will not fail? hmmm not very high. I have read in the Apple support web pages that actually when you buy the drives from apple to set them up as a RAID when you buy a mac pro from them they make sure that the drives are from different batches. I can't vouch for this, but it sounds reasonable given the prices they charge for drives and memory.

I copied all my files into an external firewire drive and then nuked my system (I formatted all drives and set them up as RAID 5). This way I didn't have to wait for the transition from JBOD and formatting is relatively fast (less than an hour).

However, after 2 weeks or so TWO of my drives started showing funny behavior. One of them started making noises, like it was spinning out of control, loud enough that you couldn't sleep in the same room even if the mac pro wasn't doing anything but spinning the drives. :(

The other problem is that, guess what? a drive would suddenly disappear from the RAID, like it was just not installed. Then for a day or so the RAID would run degraded and after a while recognize the drive and go back to normal.

So after a month I decided to upgrade the drives to server class ( also Western digital but server class model) and problems went away. (this time I did order from different vendors :)

Quite frankly, I believe the problem is your drives and not the card, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see ANY drives. If you can, exchange the hard drives for another brand or at least to server quality.

mac
 
ManWithAPlan said:
mac,

Thanks for this info, very helpful. I am waiting for my new MP to arrive (Friday hopefully!). It will have OSX Server and the Mac RAID card with 4x1TB drives. Supposedly, apple ships the OS installed on Drive 1 and all drives are JBOD initially. I am leaning toward config'ing all 4 drives in a RAID5 for the reasons you mention. Can I ask, did you just set up one massive RAID5 volume, or did you create separate volumes for OS/apps, scratch, backup, etc.? Any advice you can give, let me know. I obviously know about the initial battery charge thing and then the coversion of 4TB of drive space in JBOD to RAID5 will likely take a LONG time, but that's fine. Just anything you can think of, let me know.

I truly appreciate it....let's keep this thread going with each of our various experiences with RAID, because there is a dirth of info out there right now on this.

Cheers!
Brian
Click to expand...

Hi Brian,

I just have one massive RAID 5 volume :-D I run all scratch files in this volume. I currently have a backup of the most critical files to 3 different places, yeah I know, but you can't be too paranoid about backing up data. Curiously enough, none of this is in my RAID. In any case, if a hard disk fails I am covered since it is RAID 5 and you can still work while waiting for a spare in the mail.

I do have one problem with my RAID though, and that is .mac idisk syncing. I back up some of my files to my idisk and syncing ALWAYS hangs. I don't know why is this, but I shut down the mac and when I restart, the idisk shows my files and when I log in to my idisk from a different machine the files are readable, so... I don't know what happens.

Other than that, I really have no complains, other than probably you will waste space if you have a lot of small files, say hundreds of thousands of text documents, like for example if you are serving a huge website or a large text library of some kind. This is because of the allocation of the sectors in the drives, a specific file is allotted a minimum byte amount, hence if your text files are smaller than this you are wasting space.

Another thing to consider would be disk fragmentation. Before Tiger I read that it was an issue, and that if you had a RAID you had to defragment your disk once in a while. In any case, I don't think the RAID card has a utility that does this and I haven't read anywhere if this is a serious issue. Back when I got my first RAID I had to defrag it constantly and this was the case on systems 7, 8 , 9 and X up to 10.2, but I haven't seen anything on Leopard...

From what I read on this thread, I would nuke the system that Apple sends, reformat all the drives to RAID 5 and then partition the RAID to your liking, which I think the best is one partition anyway. This approach seems the faster setting up procedure from what I have read. I definitely did not spend as much time as the original poster spent when setting up the card (I didn't migrate my drives, I formatted them).

Setting up one partition seems the safest and speediest alternative. Because if you set up a RAID with 2 drives you are limited to RAID 1 (mirroring) or RAID 0 (stripping) the first one gives half the capacity with added piece of mind while the second one gives you added speed at the expense of a drive failure will bring your whole partition down. RAID 5 gives you both, but you need at least 3 drives, and if you just set up 3 drives, that means that you leave one standalone, which seems like a waste anyway, that is why I decided to use all of them as RAID5.

In any case, I have yet to read anywhere that setting up a separate drive for scratch, applications, etc gives added advantages. I haven't seen it, but maybe somebody can share his/her experiences on this.

Also, video professionals back up their RAIDs constantly to an external RAID. In an ideal world you should back up your RAID constantly to another device. Since there are no 4 TB drives yet, that means another RAID :p

Good luck setting up the mac pro of your dreams!

mac
 
valdore said:
What's the difference between a server quality drive and a normal drive?
Click to expand...

There are two versions, one consumer and one server "grade":

consumer one:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western Digital/WD7500AAKS/

server grade one:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western Digital/WD7500AYYS/

For starters the server one has 2 extra years of warranty and a published mean time before failure (that is, on average, how many hours it takes for this drive to fail) but I couldn't find the rate on the consumer one, I would presume it is lower. And the seek times on the second one are lower! (But quite honestly I don't know if 1.3 ms of access time make a difference... :p) But I can tell you that the server class drive, at least in my case, is certainly quieter.

mac
 
mac666er said:
Quite frankly, I believe the problem is your drives and not the card, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see ANY drives. If you can, exchange the hard drives for another brand or at least to server quality.
Click to expand...
Well... The four drives I mentionned are WD Caviar RE2 Raid Edition (WD7500AYYS), and they all fail no matter what. One was DOA, another one died soon after (no longer recognized, even when I reconnect the iPass cable to the motherboard). The last two cause diskutil to fail with an error code -9944 while attempting to format them. The drives then start clicking for ever (sounding like a cricket or something). The same thing occur when I try to build a RAID with them (even a straighforward enhanced JBOD). No RAID is ever built as RAID utility spins the candybar for ever.
In short, they're all server grade, brand new, and just plain dead. As is the fifth one (customer grade, SE16) bought elsewhere. It's no longer listed in the devices list too (/dev/disk*).

The fact that you have the same drives up and running allow me to discard the assumption by which there could be an incompatibility between the card and the drives. I'm left with two : a somewhat faulty RAID card is killing them for some reason, or all WD drives were damagaged/bad.
I want to believe the later is true as a tribute to Murphy's law :eek:
 
mac666er said:
Hi Brian,

I just have one massive RAID 5 volume :-D I run all scratch files in this volume. I currently have a backup of the most critical files to 3 different places, yeah I know, but you can't be too paranoid about backing up data. Curiously enough, none of this is in my RAID. In any case, if a hard disk fails I am covered since it is RAID 5 and you can still work while waiting for a spare in the mail.

I do have one problem with my RAID though, and that is .mac idisk syncing. I back up some of my files to my idisk and syncing ALWAYS hangs. I don't know why is this, but I shut down the mac and when I restart, the idisk shows my files and when I log in to my idisk from a different machine the files are readable, so... I don't know what happens.

Other than that, I really have no complains, other than probably you will waste space if you have a lot of small files, say hundreds of thousands of text documents, like for example if you are serving a huge website or a large text library of some kind. This is because of the allocation of the sectors in the drives, a specific file is allotted a minimum byte amount, hence if your text files are smaller than this you are wasting space.

Another thing to consider would be disk fragmentation. Before Tiger I read that it was an issue, and that if you had a RAID you had to defragment your disk once in a while. In any case, I don't think the RAID card has a utility that does this and I haven't read anywhere if this is a serious issue. Back when I got my first RAID I had to defrag it constantly and this was the case on systems 7, 8 , 9 and X up to 10.2, but I haven't seen anything on Leopard...

From what I read on this thread, I would nuke the system that Apple sends, reformat all the drives to RAID 5 and then partition the RAID to your liking, which I think the best is one partition anyway. This approach seems the faster setting up procedure from what I have read. I definitely did not spend as much time as the original poster spent when setting up the card (I didn't migrate my drives, I formatted them).

Setting up one partition seems the safest and speediest alternative. Because if you set up a RAID with 2 drives you are limited to RAID 1 (mirroring) or RAID 0 (stripping) the first one gives half the capacity with added piece of mind while the second one gives you added speed at the expense of a drive failure will bring your whole partition down. RAID 5 gives you both, but you need at least 3 drives, and if you just set up 3 drives, that means that you leave one standalone, which seems like a waste anyway, that is why I decided to use all of them as RAID5.

In any case, I have yet to read anywhere that setting up a separate drive for scratch, applications, etc gives added advantages. I haven't seen it, but maybe somebody can share his/her experiences on this.

Also, video professionals back up their RAIDs constantly to an external RAID. In an ideal world you should back up your RAID constantly to another device. Since there are no 4 TB drives yet, that means another RAID :p

Good luck setting up the mac pro of your dreams!

mac
Click to expand...

Thanks mac, much appreciated! I will likely do the same thing I guess, just 1 massive RAID5 volume. Will really enjoy being able to lose a drive, and still keep on ticking. I do indeed have several large external drives for backups, and am well-versed in preserving my data that way as well.

She arrives on Friday, I have confirmed with FedEx, so I wait impatiently here! I think maybe you're right about just wiping the drives, and formatting from scratch in a RAID5, then installing Leopard Server on that, followed by my app's, etc. Then I should be off and running! I'll let you all know how I make out.

Thanks again,
Brian
 
Question on RAID card and Bootcamp...

I read through this thread - and see that Windows won't work with the RAID card - but what if you only set up RAID with say, three drives, and leave the fourth unraided? Can you then install Windows via bootcamp on that unraided drive? Or is the issue that once the RAID card is installed, Windows won't see it?

It seems like three disks on RAID 5 could be a good choice as you get less of a capacity penalty as you would with four...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306212
 
louden said:
I read through this thread - and see that Windows won't work with the RAID card - but what if you only set up RAID with say, three drives, and leave the fourth unraided? Can you then install Windows via bootcamp on that unraided drive? Or is the issue that once the RAID card is installed, Windows won't see it?

It seems like three disks on RAID 5 could be a good choice as you get less of a capacity penalty as you would with four...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306212
Click to expand...

You can't run Windows on Boot Camp if you have the RAID card.
 
mac666er said:
Hi Brian,
Another thing to consider would be disk fragmentation. Before Tiger I read that it was an issue, and that if you had a RAID you had to defragment your disk once in a while. In any case, I don't think the RAID card has a utility that does this and I haven't read anywhere if this is a serious issue. Back when I got my first RAID I had to defrag it constantly and this was the case on systems 7, 8 , 9 and X up to 10.2, but I haven't seen anything on Leopard...
mac
Click to expand...

Just FYI...Drive Genius 2 just came out and support defrag'ing within Leopard...

http://www.prosoftengineering.com/p...hp?PHPSESSID=db278877e018a78aff4b42ccbc7dbd33

I plan to get it and use it!

-Brian
 
scottydawg said:
You can't run Windows on Boot Camp if you have the RAID card.
Click to expand...

It *should* work, but I can't try it until Friday when I get my new MP! But I have heard of folks using the 4th drive bay for Vista or WinXP, etc. and using Bootcamp for that drive only. Not entirely sure where I read that though.

In my case, I'm planning on using VMWare's Fusion to run multiple OS's simultaneously with OSX server. I'm using 16GB of RAM, so shouldn't be a problem. Not sure if I'll miss not having Bootcamp, if I decide to use all 4 drives for my RAID5. I don't use my machine for gaming really, so i doubt I'll miss not having Bootcamp. I love VMWare in general, been a huge fan on windows side, so will be doing lots with that. Lookin forward to 5 OS's running simultaneously!

Brian
 
louden said:
I read through this thread - and see that Windows won't work with the RAID card - but what if you only set up RAID with say, three drives, and leave the fourth unraided? Can you then install Windows via bootcamp on that unraided drive? Or is the issue that once the RAID card is installed, Windows won't see it?

It seems like three disks on RAID 5 could be a good choice as you get less of a capacity penalty as you would with four...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306212
Click to expand...

The problem with this approach is that during the bootcamp installation you need to reboot and once this happens your mac will not boot. This is because the machine is looking for some windows boot disk, but since the RAID card isn't supported, it cycles through the boot process looking for drives attached to the machine, and eventually shows a question mark on the screen :-(
 
kakace said:
Well... The four drives I mentionned are WD Caviar RE2 Raid Edition (WD7500AYYS), and they all fail no matter what. One was DOA, another one died soon after (no longer recognized, even when I reconnect the iPass cable to the motherboard). The last two cause diskutil to fail with an error code -9944 while attempting to format them. The drives then start clicking for ever (sounding like a cricket or something). The same thing occur when I try to build a RAID with them (even a straighforward enhanced JBOD). No RAID is ever built as RAID utility spins the candybar for ever.
In short, they're all server grade, brand new, and just plain dead. As is the fifth one (customer grade, SE16) bought elsewhere. It's no longer listed in the devices list too (/dev/disk*).

The fact that you have the same drives up and running allow me to discard the assumption by which there could be an incompatibility between the card and the drives. I'm left with two : a somewhat faulty RAID card is killing them for some reason, or all WD drives were damagaged/bad.
I want to believe the later is true as a tribute to Murphy's law :eek:
Click to expand...


Hmmm You are right, you have bad drives, the giveaway is the clicking sound. Once you have this your disks are gone. In fact most hard drive repair shops advice to automatically pull the drives from the system once this happens in order to avoid any damages to the disk and have better chances at data recovery.

Sorry to hear about your loss, but you can talk to the store where you bought them and exchange them, or at the very least contact Western Digital and ask for an exchange, that is what the warranty is for, right?

Last time this happened to me was with a Seagate drive and they did exchange it, no questions asked. Also, a friend of mine just lost his Toshiba last year. Hard drive failure is not that uncommon, and also of note is that you bought all drives at once, maybe you got a bad batch of drives?

mac
 
Boot camp with RAID card

mac666er said:
No, check Apple's documentation. If you try this, bootcamp will tell you that it is unsupported and quit :-(
Click to expand...
Get an iPASS cable to plug into the motherboard iPass port. Run this cable to external drives or mount them in one of the CD bays. OSX will recognize the drives as usual from the motherboard, place bootcamp and windows on this drive or drives. Leave the RAID card for OSX. Best of both worlds. The problem is there is no windows RAID card driver. When in windows the RAID volumes will not be seen. In OSX all drives and RAID volumes will be there.

Cheers
 
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