Mac Pro RAID Card Installation

[ManWithAPlan]

Sounds like a pretty good backup scheme.
I'm still stewing about how to set mine up. No hurry though. However, I'd really like to know if it's better to plug into an eSATA for the OS/Apps drive, allowing all of the drives on the RAID controller to actually run a RAID volume. To me, and this is just my humble opinion, it seems a waste to use up a drive connected to the RAID card but not actually part of a RAID set. YMMV, as I said, I'm just stewing...

Why mess with external SATA connectors, hacking around with the insides of the Mac, when there is little to nothing to gain by doing so. I'm a systems engineer for a server software company, I have worked with server hardware and software for 15 years, I am very comfortable with such things, but it comes down to not wanting to spend my free time tweaking for the sake of tweaking, when there are so many other things to spend my time enjoying my computer with. The RAID construct that I have now is very capable, without going crazy on it. It blows away any machine I've ever owned, and my backup strategy will ensure that my family's digital memories will be safe, and serving them up to the extended family will be a ton of fun with OSX Server. This box also makes a great lab platform for me for virtual machines supporting multiple disparate OS's (FreeBSD,Win2K3 Server,Vista,XP,RedHat, etc.).

Most folks recommend creating a single, fast, dedicated boot drive, for nothing but the OS (or multiple OS's via VM's) and the apps. Search in the forums on macgurus.com under the RAID area. When the subject of RAID'ing your boot drive comes around, most IT professionals will tell you that it is total overkill at best, and a misguided use of resources at worst. Any machine of the power and speed of the current MacPro's is very capable of running complex software at a lightning fast pace...the bottlenecks come up when modifying or reading data, especially large files like HD video, high resolution photography, etc. That is why its so great to leverage a high-speed hardware RAID solution for the Data volume(s). The speed is a huge part of it, and of course the fault tolerance of being able to keep working even when a drive fails. It's a fact that software is much more easily replaced than the cherished memories we all have in our photos, movies, music, etc. Put your RAID emphasis on data files, not software applications. Use daily/weekly backups to provide a DR scheme for your software. Do the same for your data as well, but with the added peace of mind that you've also got some internal failover capability on box (not to mention the speed gains!)....

That's my take on all this, after noodling on it night and day for a week, prior to getting the new toy!

By the way, keep in mind that the single JBOD+ disk for OS/apps still benefits from the 256MB cache on the RAID card, not to mention the backup battery should a power event occur. It's not like you are getting no benefit from the RAID card for that drive. To each his own, for sure...the nice part is that none of this needs to be permanent, if you choose a strategy, and you don't like it, just re-image and start over...trial and error are most likely the best approach.

 

[MacInMotion]

RAID card is only 4 lanes.

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.

On the Early 2008 Mac Pro's, the top slot is a 4x PCI slot and the RAID card seems to perform just as well. So I believe the RAID card is only a 4 lane card. That's 1 GB/s (1 GigaBYTE/second) of bandwith, plenty for a 4 disk RAID card.

 

[MacInMotion]

Backup plan

Most folks recommend creating a single, fast, dedicated boot drive, for nothing but the OS (or multiple OS's via VM's) and the apps.

<snip>

Put your RAID emphasis on data files, not software applications. Use daily/weekly backups to provide a DR scheme for your software.

I generally agree with ManWithAPlan, but unfortunately Apple insists on keeping all of the user's "home" directory (all the data files) on the boot drive, which gets even worse if you're using FileVault (which, now that Spotlight indexes EVERYTHING, is really the only way to keep other users of your computer from accidentally reading your mail).

Fortunately, TimeMachine is supposed to backup stuff in FileVault properly (file at a time, keeping it encrypted), so I'm going to have to rely on that.

After that, though, let me say that random access time is much more important than throughput on your OS drive, so that's where to spring for a SAS drive. See my other post here for details.

 

[MacInMotion]

My Installation Nightmare

Oh Dear God This is insane!

Please, for the love of God and for your own good... put the card in your box and let it charge fully before connecting the drives to it.

Setup hung and I hard to cold-start the box. This caused the volume to show an error and now the system is slow. REAL slow, like almost 20 minutes to boot.

I agree if you are planning on booting off a RAID array. If you're using a plain disk for boot and then a 3-drive RAID array, you can get a little bit of work done before the battery charges. See below.

I believe it took around 16 hours to initialize my 4x750GB Raid 5 array. So it'll probably take a couple extra hours for your 4x1TB drives. You definately do not want to do anything until the battery is charged. EVERYTHING takes significantly longer with a discharged battery. I also tried installing Leopard before the Raid 5 finished and it took forever. It's not worth doing anything until the battery is charged and the array is initialized.

I ordered the RAID card separately in case I wanted to send it back. It was a very difficult install, impossible with the tools that ship with it. I had to remove the drive bay 1 SAS/SATA connector so I could get the iPass cable to go the other way (towards the card), being careful not to break the very fine wires in the area. Then, as tough as it was taking the whole computer apart, it was even tougher to get the fan assembly screwed back in, because now there is a 9 inch deep slot you have to work in because the card is in the way, barely enough width to get my hand in, and definitely not enough to use the right-angle Phillips screwdriver that comes with the card. I thought I was going to have to go out and buy a long screwdriver with an attachment to hold the screw on the end of it but I lucked out and managed to squeeze the screw in between my second and third fingers. I'm not looking forward to doing this again when my iPass cable shows up.

Then, for my card, it took 32 hours for the battery to reach an acceptable charge. Apparently it had to go through 2 or 3 reconditioning cycles. Writing to the RAID array, even after it had finished initializing, without the battery (and therefore the write cache) was a painful experience. Peak sequential writes were 20MB/sec. I killed the OS X install when it predicted it would take 6 hours. But all this time I was easily configuring my non-RAID SAS boot drive. [Follow up: that battery died in only 8 months, necessitating a replacement.]

I say if your battery isn't nearly full when you start up your computer, go ahead and set up and initialize your RAID sets and volumes, you might as well have the drives doing something while it's charging the battery and that works in the background easily, but don't try to do anything more than that. It took almost exactly 12 hours to initialize my 3 X 750GB Ultrastar SATA RAID5 array, and yes, it might have only taken 2-4 hours if the battery was charged but it was overnight either way.

Now that things are up and running, I'm getting about 150MB/s read and write off the RAID 5 array, compared to 110MB/s off the SAS drive and 20MB/s write without the battery. But the SAS drive blows the RAID array away with random read/write performance, which is what you need for the OS: lots of accesses of tiny files.

 

[ManWithAPlan]

I generally agree with ManWithAPlan, but unfortunately Apple insists on keeping all of the user's "home" directory (all the data files) on the boot drive, which gets even worse if you're using FileVault (which, now that Spotlight indexes EVERYTHING, is really the only way to keep other users of your computer from accidentally reading your mail).

Fortunately, TimeMachine is supposed to backup stuff in FileVault properly (file at a time, keeping it encrypted), so I'm going to have to rely on that.

After that, though, let me say that random access time is much more important than throughput on your OS drive, so that's where to spring for a SAS drive. See my other post here for details.

It insists, but you don't need to listen Moving home folders to the data drive is a slam dunk...check it out...

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071025220746340&query=moving+home+directory

 

[MacFanBoyIIe]

Why mess with external SATA connectors, hacking around with the insides of the Mac, when there is little to nothing to gain by doing so....but it comes down to not wanting to spend my free time tweaking for the sake of tweaking, when there are so many other things to spend my time enjoying my computer with. The RAID construct that I have now is very capable, without going crazy on it....This box also makes a great lab platform for me for virtual machines supporting multiple disparate OS's (FreeBSD,Win2K3 Server,Vista,XP,RedHat, etc.)....By the way, keep in mind that the single JBOD+ disk for OS/apps still benefits from the 256MB cache on the RAID card, not to mention the backup battery should a power event occur. It's not like you are getting no benefit from the RAID card for that drive.

Great post. Looks like we agree that the take on this is "YMMV" and to each his own. A few after-thoughts:
I think there is plenty (PLENTY!) to gain by hooking up an eSATA to the motherboard. I mean, it's there! Use it! We are proud Mac users and geeks. Tweaking is how we all got started in the Tech Industry! I agree you have a great RAID construct. I also agree that you could use your box for lab work on other OSs. That's another reason for an eSATA port on the back of your box; use it for a sandbox HDD with other OSs. Or you could mount your boot drive in the lower DVD bay, tucked away and secure allowing you FULL access to all 4 RAID slots for your data drive.
I know you are getting some benefits by keeping your boot drive attached to the RAID card (taking advantage of the cache and backup), but like you said, your boot drive is heavily backed up, and easy to re-install if necessary. If you really wanted to keep your OS/Apps drive attached to the RAID card, you could STILL hook up to the other SATA ports, install another internal HDD in the lower DVD bay and use SuperDuper to clone your OS/Apps drive to it as pseudo-hot-spare.
My point is, the possible configurations you give yourself by adding the eSATA are increased greatly and we LOVE TO TINKER with our Macs. I still haven't heard a good reason NOT to do it. That's just my take, FWIW.
Configuration debate aside, how do you like your new Mac Pro?

 

[MacFanBoyIIe]

It insists, but you don't need to listen Moving home folders to the data drive is a slam dunk...check it out...

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071025220746340&query=moving+home+directory

Very true. I found out on another forum that it is much easier in Leo to switch volumes than it was in Tiger. Good tutorial.

 

[MacInMotion]

It insists, but you don't need to listen Moving home folders to the data drive is a slam dunk...check it out...

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071025220746340&query=moving+home+directory

Thanks for that tip; I hadn't heard about that. Given OS X's Unix underpinnings, I'm sure that moving the home directory mostly works, but given all of Apple's enhancements, I'm scared of trying it in combination with FileVault and TimeMachine. It just seems like an area ripe for serious bugs/failures that would not only wipe out the primary data, but the backup, too.

Before Spotlight, I thought FileVault was a bit of overkill for most things, but now it's the only way to keep Spotlight from exporting all your information to the other people using your computer while still allowing you to use Spotlight on it yourself. (This is because FileVault works by creating a separate volume for your home directory and Spotlight indexes by volume.)

 

[tokenfirstyear]

DO NOT BUY AN APPLE MAC PRO RAID CARD

This card is being returned Monday morning.
According to the Product Specialist, the battery takes 7 days to charge.

Every 30 days days the card will recondition the battery. A recondition cycle is draining the battery for 24 hours, then charging it for 7 days.

ANY time the battery is not fully charged, the write cache is disabled.

SO, 8 days EACH MONTH the system will run slow.

This is the single worst RAID controller that I have ever worked with.

Just to correct some misinformation - this is from Article 306231:

Question: Why am I presented with a warning in RAID Utility that the write cache is disabled due to the backup battery lacking a 72-hour charge?

Answer: The write cache is disabled automatically to protect data being written to RAID volumes when the battery charge is not sufficient to back up cached data for 72 hours. This message is normally encountered when a RAID Card is used for the first time, when the battery enters a conditioning cycle once every three months, or when a computer with a RAID Card installed is shut down for any length of time.

 

[MacFanBoyIIe]

Just to correct some misinformation - this is from Article 306231:

Question: Why am I presented with a warning in RAID Utility that the write cache is disabled due to the backup battery lacking a 72-hour charge?

Answer: The write cache is disabled automatically to protect data being written to RAID volumes when the battery charge is not sufficient to back up cached data for 72 hours. This message is normally encountered when a RAID Card is used for the first time, when the battery enters a conditioning cycle once every three months, or when a computer with a RAID Card installed is shut down for any length of time.

Thanks, but we know. Read the rest of the thread.

 

[Stuart in Oz]

Thanks, but we know. Read the rest of the thread.

I just read the entire thread and I didn't see that specifically mentioned before.

I'm about to order a Mac Pro for my business where it's going to be an office server for my accounting software (MoneyWorks) and several product & document databases we run using FileMaker.

Most people posting here seem most concerned with input and output speeds (I guess you're all doing video & photo editing) but I need reliability and maximum uptime rather than high file read/write speeds. RAID 1 is what I'm probably going with, with daily incremental backups to an external source - DVD or tape (if I can find a tape drive for Mac these days).

Does anyone else here have any experience with using the Apple RAID card for this type of situation? Any suggestions?

 

[MacInMotion]

I just read the entire thread and I didn't see that specifically mentioned before.

It's easy to miss, but it is here: https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=4474402&months#post4474402

I'm about to order a Mac Pro for my business where it's going to be an office server for my accounting software (MoneyWorks) and several product & document databases we run using FileMaker.

Most people posting here seem most concerned with input and output speeds (I guess you're all doing video & photo editing) but I need reliability and maximum uptime rather than high file read/write speeds. RAID 1 is what I'm probably going with, with daily incremental backups to an external source - DVD or tape (if I can find a tape drive for Mac these days).

Does anyone else here have any experience with using the Apple RAID card for this type of situation? Any suggestions?

The RAID card it not necessary in your situation. You will do fine with software RAID 1. The RAID card is only worth the money if you want/need RAID 5 or if you want to use SAS drives or if you want to get the most speed possible. I have it because, like most of the other posters, I'm working with video where I need the speed, and because I'm working with direct-to-disk video where I need the safety of RAID 5 without the storage penalty of RAID 1, and because I'm a geek and want the high performance of a 15,000 RPM SAS drive for my boot drive.

As for external backups, I recommend SATA drives in a trayless enclosure which lets you treat SATA drives like floppy disks. They are cost-competitive with tape and of course faster, too. The only reason to use tape is for long-term (> 5 years) archiving or if you have massive amounts of data to back up. Here's the cost comparison:

800GB LTO-4 tape is $80, so 4TB of tape storage costs $400
500GB Hitachi Deskstart P7K500 is $80, so 4TB of disk storage costs $640

However, you have to factor in that an internal trayless SATA enclosure from Wiebetech is $30, while the cheapest LTO-4 Tape drive I've seen is $4,000 plus you need to spend more on a SCSI host adapter. So although at first glance the disks look more expensive at $160/TB instead of $100/TB, you'd have to store over 65TB of data to break even on the cost of the tape drive.

Of course prices are constantly changing and you might want to reassess at some point, but for the amount of data I have to back up (less than 3TB) it's a no-brainer. I can keep 4 sets of backups rotating on and off site using SATA drives and still not spend half of what I'd spend on a tape drive. I can also deliver to clients on SATA drives that they all can read with existing hardware instead of giving them LTO tapes that very few of them can do anything with.

 

[mac666er]

I hope mike/mission is still aware of this thread...

For the later posters, I'll give a quick update of what just happened to me in the last weeks.

I have a mac pro (2007) with an Apple RAID card and I was looking for a way to boot windows off a drive that was NOT connected to the RAID card. It just so happens that mission75 told us that he had an esata card that could boot windows:

you cant with windows but you can with a sata controller. I'm booting 2 windows OS right now with a FirmTek 2 slot sata controller. I didn't know it was possible. I found just by trying it. Windows is very hardware oriented to work with as many different types of computers so it will freak out if you try to boot from a firewire. I too want to boot windows via a raid card, but have no idea if you can.

So I decided to buy it and give a try... And so I installed windows (not bootcamp) on a drive attached to it and guess what? It worked! I installed XP and was able to boot XP on my mac pro via this way! However it was only with a few caveats:

1. All the drives have to be unplugged from the RAID card
2. Windows has to be installed on the drive BEFORE you try to boot it from the esata card (as mission said) AND the card driver has to be on the drive.

But it will definitely boot. Now the tricky part and the reason that I am posting is that I am trying to find a way to have ALL the RAID drives plugged in AND still be able to boot off this e-sata drive.

Sadly, I haven't had any success trying to do this as I installed rEFIt on my mac pro and the RAID partition is present but NOT the e-sata partition :-( Fiddling in rEFIt the Apple RAID card is recognized, as well as the e-sata one but I haven't been able to get the external hard disk partition (FAT) to load in rEFIt, I am starting to think that there needs to be an EFI e-sata card driver loaded in order for rEFIt to "see" the e-sata partition...

If I find how to overcome this I'll definitely post it...

M.

 

[MacInMotion]

You don't need an eSata card

I have a mac pro (2007) with an Apple RAID card and I was looking for a way to boot windows off a drive that was NOT connected to the RAID card. It just so happens that mission75 told us that he had an esata card that could boot windows:



So I decided to buy it and give a try... And so I installed windows (not bootcamp) on a drive attached to it and guess what? It worked! I installed XP and was able to boot XP on my mac pro via this way! However it was only with a few caveats:

1. All the drives have to be unplugged from the RAID card
2. Windows has to be installed on the drive BEFORE you try to boot it from the esata card (as mission said) AND the card driver has to be on the drive.

But it will definitely boot. Now the tricky part and the reason that I am posting is that I am trying to find a way to have ALL the RAID drives plugged in AND still be able to boot off this e-sata drive.

Well, you could have gotten an iPass cable, also known as a SFF 8087 cable, and an eSata bracket and used the eSata connections on the motherboard. That's what I'm doing. (Described in detail earlier in this thread or in another thread, I don't remember.) Or put the drive in the second optical drive bay.

There's no Windows driver for the Apple RAID card and until there is you won't be able to access the RAID when booted into Windows. The Mac OS will see the Windows drive, though, and you can use MacFuse to write to it.

Let me point out that I've done all that except use MacFuse and my benchmarks show that except for video performance, running Windows XP Pro on my Mac with VMware provides 95% of the performance of booting into Windows AND provides full access to the RAID array. It's a much better solution unless you really need the performance of your video card for what you are doing. In my case the performance boost that comes from having the OS and swap on a RAID array outweighs the minor VM penalty VMware imposes, so I actually do better with VMware than booted natively into Windows.

 

[mac666er]

Well, you could have gotten an iPass cable, also known as a SFF 8087 cable, and an eSata bracket and used the eSata connections on the motherboard. That's what I'm doing. (Described in detail earlier in this thread or in another thread, I don't remember.) Or put the drive in the second optical drive bay.

Thanks for the reply. But from all the threads that I have read, those internal Mac Pro ports DO NOT support booting windows. Look at the latest thread in the apple support forums (message 2):

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1488436&tstart=0

There's no Windows driver for the Apple RAID card and until there is you won't be able to access the RAID when booted into Windows. The Mac OS will see the Windows drive, though, and you can use MacFuse to write to it.

I don't want to access the RAID volume, I just want to be able to boot the Mac Pro to Windows to do some heavy computations and highend 3D graphics ( I have a quadro graphics card) and I would rather do this through the mac than to buy another workstation.

Let me point out that I've done all that except use MacFuse and my benchmarks show that except for video performance, running Windows XP Pro on my Mac with VMware provides 95% of the performance of booting into Windows AND provides full access to the RAID array. It's a much better solution unless you really need the performance of your video card for what you are doing. In my case the performance boost that comes from having the OS and swap on a RAID array outweighs the minor VM penalty VMware imposes, so I actually do better with VMware than booted natively into Windows.

This is interesting I never thought that the RAID would actually boost a virtual environment performance, thanks for the tip! So have you booted windows through external devices connected to the eSata extender cable?

 

[MacInMotion]

Thanks for the reply. But from all the threads that I have read, those internal Mac Pro ports DO NOT support booting windows. Look at the latest thread in the apple support forums (message 2):

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1488436&tstart=0

Don't confuse the two Optical Disk Drive SATA ports, which have limitations, with the 4 full-featured SATA ports that become available when you switch the internal bays over to the RAID card.

Yes, I've booted windows off an eSATA drive connected via iPass cable to the motherboard.

 

[mac666er]

Don't confuse the two Optical Disk Drive SATA ports, which have limitations, with the 4 full-featured SATA ports that become available when you switch the internal bays over to the RAID card.

Yes, I've booted windows off an eSATA drive connected via iPass cable to the motherboard.

Hmmm... thanks for the clarification! I wasn't aware that you could put 'another' i-pass cable in the connector where the original one used to be. So if I understood correctly in the searches I have done about this, you can plug an i-pass to 4 sata connectors cable, such as this one:

http://www.provantage.com/adaptec-2247000-r~7ADPC19L.htm

Then, connect those sata connectors to a faceplate that converts them to e-sata and then plug an e-sata hard drive there. And that further, all these e-sata ports would be bootable. That is interesting because I didn't know this was possible until you brought it up...

Do you recommend any particular brand?

M

 

[65StangBoy]

Don't mean to butt in. But that's absolutely correct, I've been running my system this way for about six months. I've got 4x750's in a RAID5 hooked up to the Apple RAID Card. I'm then running four more drives in an external eSata enclosure via the Logic Board iPass connector. One of which is my bootcamp drive. My current iPass to sata cable is too short so I have some extenders in there. When I get around to it I'll replace it with this cable. Similar to yours, just a little cheaper.

http://www.priceguidenetwork.com/co...7l-02-50cm-ipass-to-4-sata-cable-pb-free.html

Let me know if you want the exact layout and the parts that I used in my setup.

Hmmm... thanks for the clarification! I wasn't aware that you could put 'another' i-pass cable in the connector where the original one used to be. So if I understood correctly in the searches I have done about this, you can plug an i-pass to 4 sata connectors cable, such as this one:

http://www.provantage.com/adaptec-2247000-r~7ADPC19L.htm

Then, connect those sata connectors to a faceplate that converts them to e-sata and then plug an e-sata hard drive there. And that further, all these e-sata ports would be bootable. That is interesting because I didn't know this was possible until you brought it up...

Do you recommend any particular brand?

M

 

[nanofrog]

Opps.

 

[Beaner]

Reviving this thread, is there any word out of Apple when the Mac Raid card will have bootable windows drivers ? This is such a major bummer

 

[Rick Here]

Reviving this thread, is there any word out of Apple when the Mac Raid card will have bootable windows drivers ? This is such a major bummer

The CalDigit card will be out soon with drivers for both OSX and Windows.
My bet is Apple may never have drivers. It has been too much time, why support the oppositions OS.

 

[LethalWolfe]

The CalDigit card will be out soon with drivers for both OSX and Windows.
My bet is Apple may never have drivers. It has been too much time, why support the oppositions OS.

Because running the oppositions OS is a key selling point for OS X?


Lethal

 

[nanofrog]

I'd have to agree with LethalWolfe.

Apple makes an OS that supports MS's OS via Boot Camp, but their own RAID card doesn't work in this manner. Not good. There are plenty of people it seems, that have found themselves in this dilemma, and currently have no solution until Apple writes drivers. Or they can buy a different card. Inconsistent at best, but makes for pissed off customers. (Especially when the competitors cards that can do this are less expensive).

Just my $.02.

 

[yzjsky]

Can not detect SAS drive.

Hi,
I just got the raid card today, but after I connect it and all 4 SAS drives, the MAC OSX Installtion program can not detect the SAS at all, I open the RAID Utility but no dirve there, the battery is charging.

Do I have to wait for a full charged raid card so that the SAS drives can be detected?

 

[MacInMotion]

I just got the raid card today, but after I connect it and all 4 SAS drives, the MAC OSX Installtion program can not detect the SAS at all, I open the RAID Utility but no dirve there, the battery is charging.

Do I have to wait for a full charged raid card so that the SAS drives can be detected?

No, the drives should be detected right away, although it will be VERY painful to write anything to them until the battery is charged. If the RAID card does not see any of the 4 drives apple:->About This Mac...->More info...->Hardware RAID should have information under "Drives") then you probably didn't connect the iPass cable to the card properly.

It might be possible that you didn't install the drives correctly, instead. Did you feel the drive connectors seat when you pushed the drives into the bays? Maybe try installing a SATA drive and see if it shows up (a) at all and (b) on the RAID card and not on the Serial-ATA bus.

When you get the drives recognized, I still recommend waiting until the battery charges before you start even formatting them.