Mac Pros, Bootcamp and RAID

[dgdosen]

Hey all -

Thinking about picking up a Mac Pro - and wanted to ask this forum a question or two:

- Do you need the $800 RAID card for all types of RAID? Even mirroring?

- If you do use some kind of hardware RAID (preferably the free kind), does it work well with Bootcamp and Vista?

- Are there problems with picking up HD's from New Egg? I think I read somewhere on this forum that some of the drives needed to be flashed to work properly with the Mac Pro.

Thanks for any advice...

 

[dgdosen]

anyone?

 

[valdore]

No RAID controller needed for RAID 0 striping, RAID 1 mirroring, or JBOD. The OS X software can do this. I use a software JBOD on my Mac Pro. However you will need that controller for RAID 5, RAID 01, RAID 10, etc...

I believe, but am not totally certain, that you cannot use Bootcamp on a RAID-ed computer.

I bought my second drive for my Pro on newegg with no problem ... I believe I had to format it though.

 

[sturob]

That NewEgg/flash problem was with a particular brand of drive, for which (it would seem) NewEgg got some of their stock before the firmware was updated. I think it was a Seagate thing, could have been WD. I bet if you search for it you'll find it.

The only real problem for us is that you need a PC to flash the firmware.

Stuart

 

[Canoehead2]

No RAID controller needed for RAID 0 striping, RAID 1 mirroring, or JBOD. The OS X software can do this. I use a software JBOD on my Mac Pro. However you will need that controller for RAID 5, RAID 01, RAID 10, etc...

I believe, but am not totally certain, that you cannot use Bootcamp on a RAID-ed computer.

I bought my second drive for my Pro on newegg with no problem ... I believe I had to format it though.

You can use bootcamp on a RAIDed machine, but it is not easy and there are limitations. My primary drive is 2 WD 750s in Raid0 - my bootcamp partition lives on a different HDD. To do this I sort of had to go manual - the Bootcamp assistant won't do it. So I used the Disk Utility to set up my bootcamp drive with a Master Boot Record, then restarted with the WIN XP CD in - held down the Alt key and went thru the Windows setup, etc. Works fine.

I helped to set up another machine with a similar setup, but for some reason Windows didn't want to install, so I had to pull the drive, connect it to a windows machine briefly - I left the partition intact but did an NTFS format. Worked fine, Windows installed etc.

Not for the faint of heart, but doable

 

[mac666er]

You can use bootcamp on a RAIDed machine, but it is not easy and there are limitations. My primary drive is 2 WD 750s in Raid0 - my bootcamp partition lives on a different HDD. To do this I sort of had to go manual - the Bootcamp assistant won't do it. So I used the Disk Utility to set up my bootcamp drive with a Master Boot Record, then restarted with the WIN XP CD in - held down the Alt key and went thru the Windows setup, etc. Works fine.

I helped to set up another machine with a similar setup, but for some reason Windows didn't want to install, so I had to pull the drive, connect it to a windows machine briefly - I left the partition intact but did an NTFS format. Worked fine, Windows installed etc.

Not for the faint of heart, but doable

Do you have Apple's RAID card installed?

mac

 

[trainguy77]

Do you have Apple's RAID card installed?

mac

He must have as hardware is the only way of doing this. Unless windows knows how to handle a Mac OS X array, very unlikely.

As for the free kind, hardware RAID isn't free and software RAID(the free kind) won't work with bootcamp.

 

[dgdosen]

So Apple does provide drivers to allow Vista access to the hardware RAID?

 

[trainguy77]

So Apple does provide drivers to allow Vista access to the hardware RAID?

I was googling around and haven't seen anyone do it before. You may need a separate drive to pull it off. However, you might be able to do it without using bootcamp not %100 sure.

 

[mac666er]

So Apple does provide drivers to allow Vista access to the hardware RAID?

No, they do not, a couple of us guys are trying to figure out a way to do it. Check the other RAID card thread for details:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/384459/

So if you have a RAID card there is no Apple support for using it under windows. I haven't seen anyone be able to boot a mac pro drive connected to a RAID card into any flavor of windows, that is why I was asking.

mac

 

[MilesS2111s]

so using the last post in the link above (https://forums.macrumors.com/showthre...=384459&page=5) is it possible to have bootcamp on your non RAID data disk when you've got OSX and Apps on a RAID array? Would windows then see two disks (the data/bootcamp one) and the remaining Backup drive?

This is when not using a RAID card.

Many thanks

Miles

 

[mac666er]

so using the last post in the link above (https://forums.macrumors.com/showthre...=384459&page=5) is it possible to have bootcamp on your non RAID data disk when you've got OSX and Apps on a RAID array? Would windows then see two disks (the data/bootcamp one) and the remaining Backup drive?

This is when not using a RAID card.

Many thanks

Miles

Yes, you will be fine as long as you are not using either Apple's RAID card or an external drive.