Mac Pro RAID Card

[Draeconis]

Hey guys,

I have the chance to get my hands on a Mac Pro RAID Card for my 2010 Mac Pro. It certainly sounds interesting, but I'm a little confused about a couple of things;

My boot disk is an Intel SSD mounted in the ODD bay; can I still put 4 drives in RAID 5 and it'll just see it as a normal volume, or will the RAID controller not like it?

Do the disks really need to be from Apple, or can you use any disks with it? (I was thinking of getting 3x Hitachi 2Tb 7.2k disks).

Does this basically render Time Machine redundant?

Could I still back up my boot volume Via Time Machine, or am I better off using CCC?

Has anyone here installed Mountain Lion on a system with this RAID card?

Sorry for the spamming of questions!

 

[flatfoot]

As I understand it, the Apple RAID card takes over the four sled-bays, so the ODD connections should still work as before.

The disks don't need to be "from Apple". They don't make HDDs. You should, however use enterprise graded HDDs. Wait for nanofrog to chime in or search for his posts.

No RAID array renders a decent backup strategy redundant. The benefit of Time Machine over CCC is that it comes free with the system and integrated into that, too.
The benefit of CCC is that it makes a bootable clone of your disk(s).
So you might use CCC for your boot SSD and TimeMachine for your data RAID array.

No idea about ML and Apple RAID cards.