Mac Pro Raid Setup

[jaalex]

Hello,

I have a Early 2008 Mac Pro. I have the Apple Hardware Raid Card Installed. I have 4 2TB disks installed. Currently I've got the system disk setup in Bay 1 as a single disk. Then I have the disks in bays 2 through 4 setup as a raid 5. I've been thinking that I might be better off to make all 4 disks into a raid 5 array and then just make volumes for the system disk and my work disk. My goal is to have a system volume an a scratch/work volume for image and video editing.

Thoughts?

 

[nanofrog]

Hello,

I have a Early 2008 Mac Pro. I have the Apple Hardware Raid Card Installed. I have 4 2TB disks installed. Currently I've got the system disk setup in Bay 1 as a single disk. Then I have the disks in bays 2 through 4 setup as a raid 5. I've been thinking that I might be better off to make all 4 disks into a raid 5 array and then just make volumes for the system disk and my work disk. My goal is to have a system volume an a scratch/work volume for image and video editing.

Thoughts?

• What kind of throughputs (speed, say in MB/s) do you need?
• File sizes you typically generate?
• Actual software used, and how do you use it (layers, ...)?

I ask, as such details are important. I also realize that with the existing RAID card (garbage BTW), what can be done is limited.

The best you could do is:

1. Use the ODD_SATA ports on that particular board for both a separate OS/applications disk (HDD will give you more capacity), and a second separate disk (SSD would be the fastest, say 40GB unit from OWC) for scratch. Please note, that in your system, the ODD-SATA ports can only boot OS X (will not boot Windows or Linux).
2. Then add the 4th disk in the HDD bays to the RAID 5.

Added cost would be ~$200USD, as you don't need 2TB for OS/applications (based on $100 for the SSD and $100 for the mechanical OS/applications disk).

Past this, you'll need to get a different card, drives (should be using enterprise grade HDD's on a hardware RAID card), and possibly external enclosure/s (more members = more speed due to the added parallelism).