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Mac Pro Raid speed ... Raid 5 vs straight Sata HDs

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phildog33

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 1, 2006
109
0
Hey guys, ive put 4 of the hitachi 1tbs in my new mac pro.. and i really want to do Raid on them eventually.. and buy the pricey apple raid card.. i'll do it.. but speed wise:

How fast is a Sata connection straight from HD>Motherboard... ~75mb/s?
Is the Raid 5 config with all those drives much faster... around ~110mb/s?

I should do it.


Do you know if there is anyway to get a 5th drive into the raid 5 array? using the ODD space.. or some externals too... i need as much as space as possible...

And boot camp wont work with raid card anymore?


I was thinking to have the startup disc be a raptor to increase speed on the apps, etc... what do you guys think.. how would it integrate with the raid card, etc

Phillip
 
Dude, your questions are all answered in various posts in this site, most of them on the first page of the Mac Pro & Power Mac forum...

Your speed questions is answered by Apple at the Mac Pro page.

READ the entire ODD thread and all your questions will be answered except for the RAPTOR question. Do a search for that one and you will find 50 different threads.

Let me know if you need help crossing the street. :p
 
Why are people here so snippy about new users asking repeat questions?

A) Who cares?

B) The search function isn't very good.

C) It makes you sound rude.

Just let people post.


But on topic...A raid 5 will be much faster than a single drive. I don't know the numbers though. In my opinion if you can afford a raid 5 then do it. Better safe than sorry.

I think the better question is what's better? Raid5 or Raid 0+1?

Oh, and I have another drive in the Optical bay connected to the extra sata port. Works just fine.
 
Ya, jesus christ, what a choad! He went around and found the answers to all his questions so he could not answer them, but confidently let him know that they were there? What would have been the harm of just answering his friggin questions!! Cuz then I got this page in a search thinking I would find the answer, and now I have to waste more time searching around to find all the different sources of answers.
I mean, the thread is already created, it's not like there will be less clutter if he's a dick and doesn't answer it.

If that guy ever reads it again, everyone can clearly tell you have absolutely no life at all if you can go around finding people that ask questions that you happen to know already are answered because you've read every single post here. You're pathetic. You act like a bitchy, used up woman because you don't think logically about the value of what you're saying, you just want to bitch and nag. This is why women won't talk to you, and you have the time to commit the MacRumors site to memory so you can nail people who ask a question similar to an obscure old one, or if there's a possible answer elsewhere. I'm sure this seems important, and you feel really good about being able to catch someone that didn't search long enough and just wanted a quick answer, but in reality you should probably be working on the most important thing in life...women.

(If you can't tell, I HATE this when I search for a little while, don't find a straightforward answer right away, decide I want some opinions from people that probably have experience and know what they're talking about, and they get cut off by some dickless choad that wants to point out that I'm one of the dreaded repeaters. you'd think "repeaters" were like child molesters by the way they act)

I've had raptors in a PC before. They're LOUD. I had a pair of them in RAID, and it was very fast. Personally, I would bet money that I could get the RAID card working with a little program called nLite. You may have to install xp if you don't have a PC, get nlite and make your boot disk, and then reinstall with the raid setup...i know the bios is probably incompatible, but i feel like it would be possible with some work. perhaps someone has drivers that can access a mac style bios raid card in xp bootup.
I'm about to get a new Mac Pro, and I'm going to RAID0 2 SAS 15k's as my bootup/program/swapfile drive, and then RAID5 three 1TB's for fast access to masses of swapfile space and edit area, and then 8 1TB drives set up as a 4GB redundant permanent storage (i have 2TB permanent storage now, and i'm running low...i store all my m4a's in lossless for thousands of cds (i buy em used on ebay, copy, then sell them back on ebay for the same as what i paid..at most they end up costing $1), all my dvd movies in h264 720p and ipod settings, and hundreds of full programs for windows and osx (clearly, i have no made this available via bittorrent or any sharing thing...this is all personal stuff on a tank in the livingroom connected to the apple router)

i can say that one raptor seems a lot quicker than a large 7200rpm drive, but i thought my RAID0 setup of a pair of 7200rpm drives was as fast or faster than the single raptor
for a bootdrive, i'd always do RAID0 of a pair of superfast 10k or 15k drives
no point in paying the money for a single drive with not much storage for the money and no performance increase over 2 drives that would probably be cheaper combined and 4x the space

so, if the mac raid card sets up the same as the pc raid card i had, i'd do a pair of 10k's, and then as many as a storage tank in raid5 as you can get
then set it up so the pair of 10k's are one raid drive, and the collection of 1TB's are another raid drive...2 separate raid setups of different types and arrangements
for $1000, this RAID card had better be UNBELIEVABLE!! so it should do that with ease, and have the throughput to utilize that many drives to their full potential
 
I have 4 1TB drives and the Apple RAID card. I'm running 0+1 and have to say its freakin fast! I'm not a technical guru so I couldn't even begin to tell you how fast it is or even know how to test it to find out. The only down side to my setup is that I currently have 1.8 TB of useable space from the 4 TB. But, like I said, its pretty darn fast. 0+1 will give you the speed and cover your $ss if a drive fails. Just my 2 cents.
 
9Charms: So what if people repeat questions? A lot of people visit the forums just to see what's going on out there and normally they just look at the first page of the forum. I learn a great deal just reading the various replies! And I totally agree that the search function, even in advanced mode - SUCKS!

Anyway, to answer your question, phildog, I did a simple comparison for you.
The first pic a simple test using Xbench on my original 320GB hooked to the on board ODD (now in an external case). The drive is a Seagate 7,200.10 (so it is not a direct apple-to-apple comparison)
The second is a test on my RAID5 using 4 x 1TB Seagate ES2 drives. Normally the score is around 150 (+/-) but for some reason it is lower today. I also have another 1TB ES2 drive hooked to the ODD dedicated as a time machine drive, but for some reason, Xbench keeps giving me errors when I try to "bench" it :) (If it works, it would directly answer your question)

MrDaddy: You really get about 938GB (+/-) of drive space on so called "1TB" drives (1TB in "computer" or binary term is really 1,024GB) and since you're doing 0+1 you essentially lose half - of course, you already know that! But the question is, why did you do 0+1 instead of 5?
 

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thank you guys very much, everyone is very helpful for replying like normal good people
 
kittiyut said:
9Charms: So what if people repeat questions? A lot of people visit the forums just to see what's going on out there and normally they just look at the first page of the forum. I learn a great deal just reading the various replies! And I totally agree that the search function, even in advanced mode - SUCKS!

Anyway, to answer your question, phildog, I did a simple comparison for you.
The first pic a simple test using Xbench on my original 320GB hooked to the on board ODD (now in an external case). The drive is a Seagate 7,200.10 (so it is not a direct apple-to-apple comparison)
The second is a test on my RAID5 using 4 x 1TB Seagate ES2 drives. Normally the score is around 150 (+/-) but for some reason it is lower today. I also have another 1TB ES2 drive hooked to the ODD dedicated as a time machine drive, but for some reason, Xbench keeps giving me errors when I try to "bench" it :) (If it works, it would directly answer your question)

MrDaddy: You really get about 938GB (+/-) of drive space on so called "1TB" drives (1TB in "computer" or binary term is really 1,024GB) and since you're doing 0+1 you essentially lose half - of course, you already know that! But the question is, why did you do 0+1 instead of 5?
Click to expand...

Sweet info! Big Help, thanks!

Anyone booting to their RAID 5?
 
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