Mac Pro RAID - faulty?

[Virtuoso]

Aaaargh!

44 days after I ordered it, my Mac Pro finally arrived yesterday. It has a long and prominent scratch right by the power button, but that's the least of my concerns right now...

I booted up and all seemed well - the system shipped with the default single drive - I checked the RAID battery and was surprised and pleased to see it was showing as charged and all lights were green.

I installed 4x 750Gb WD RE2 drives and rebooted with the OSX DVD. Curiously, the battery was now showing as fully discharged. I created a RAID 5 and a single 1.78Tb volume which took several hours to complete. I then installed OSX which took around 6 hours for both discs!

The system has now been on for about 26 hours and the battery indicator hasn't moved (still showing fully discharged).

System profiler shows:

State: Faulted Battery
Fault: Battery is precharging and can't be read
Status: Charging:Yes
Conditioning: No
Connected: Yes
Discharging: No
Sufficient Charge: No

I can't find much about this on the Apple site or in the manual. What does precharging mean? Is the battery a dud? Will I have to send the whole machine back and wait an eternity to get it fixed? Should I just get a refund and spend the $8,000 this system cost on something fast and reliable?

Someone cheer me up - I spent months convincing myself to switch from PCs and a small fortune on the system. This is not a great start...

 

[cosmos]

Possibly...

Aaaargh!

44 days after I ordered it, my Mac Pro finally arrived yesterday. It has a long and prominent scratch right by the power button, but that's the least of my concerns right now...

I booted up and all seemed well - the system shipped with the default single drive - I checked the RAID battery and was surprised and pleased to see it was showing as charged and all lights were green.

I installed 4x 750Gb WD RE2 drives and rebooted with the OSX DVD. Curiously, the battery was now showing as fully discharged. I created a RAID 5 and a single 1.78Tb volume which took several hours to complete. I then installed OSX which took around 6 hours for both discs!

The system has now been on for about 26 hours and the battery indicator hasn't moved (still showing fully discharged).

System profiler shows:

State: Faulted Battery
Fault: Battery is precharging and can't be read
Status: Charging:Yes
Conditioning: No
Connected: Yes
Discharging: No
Sufficient Charge: No

I can't find much about this on the Apple site or in the manual. What does precharging mean? Is the battery a dud? Will I have to send the whole machine back and wait an eternity to get it fixed? Should I just get a refund and spend the $8,000 this system cost on something fast and reliable?

Someone cheer me up - I spent months convincing myself to switch from PCs and a small fortune on the system. This is not a great start...

I am at work and not by my system, but from what you describe it could be a faulty battery.

Couple of Observations:

1) Please tell me you did not buy Apple memory.

2) Running RAID 5 as your primary boot partition is IMHO like driving a Corvette with the parking brake on. You would be much better off having 3 drives in RAID with the boot partition on its own.

Just what did you order for $8K?

* Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core)
* 2GB (2 x 1GB)
* Mac Pro RAID Card
* 750GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
* NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB (Two dual-link DVI)
* Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel)
* Two 16x SuperDrives
* AirPort Extreme card (Wi-Fi)
* Apple Mighty Mouse
* Apple Keyboard (English) + Mac OS X

Subtotal $5,998.00

 

[Virtuoso]

1) Please tell me you did not buy Apple memory.

No - 16Gb of OWC memory (4x4Gb)

2) Running RAID 5 as your primary boot partition is IMHO like driving a Corvette with the parking brake on. You would be much better off having 3 drives in RAID with the boot partition on its own.

Really? I'd expected the performance to be close to 2 drives in RAID 0, but with the benefit of redundancy. Are you saying 4 drives in RAID 5 are slower than a single boot drive or just that data should be held separate from the OS?

Just what did you order for $8K?

* Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core)
* 2GB (2 x 1GB)
* Mac Pro RAID Card
* 500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
* NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB (Two dual-link DVI)
* One 16x SuperDrive
* AirPort Extreme card (Wi-Fi)
* Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse
* Apple Keyboard (English) + Mac OS X
* Logic Studio
* Aperture 2

Subtotal $5,477.45

Plus 16Gb of OWC memory - $1,500
Plus 4x 750Gb WD RE2 drives - $800

Anyway, after 77 mins on the phone (mostly on hold) they are shipping me another one.

After reading a few people's bad experiences with the RAID card, I've asked them to drop it from the spec and give me 2x 3.2GHz Xeons instead (the price was the same).

I'll find another 3rd party RAID solution instead which hopefully works with Boot Camp and doesn't cripple your Mac every few weeks while it's reconditioning the battery.

 

[Virtuoso]

Weird - I just pulled the drives out to return the unit and when I booted it with the single stock drive, the RAID battery shows as fully charged again.

I put one of the drives back out of curiosity and the battery is screwed again. WTF?!?

Single drive installed - battery apparently full

5 mins later, 2 drives installed - battery now empty

System profiler

Am I making some kind of basic n00b error here?

 

[cosmos]

RAID Card...

I could be wrong, but I suspect that you card has a faulty battery. I think that the failure is not tripping until more than one drive is installed.

A pretty good breakdown of RAID levels can be found here:

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/comp.html

I would recommend purchasing a RAID card after you get the replacement system. It is pretty easy to install (about 45 minutes if you take your time) and the performance gains are very real.