MacPro Raid and Bootcamp

[Beliyaal]

I'm putting together a workstation that primarily is going to be used for Windows development and I wanted to have as fast a disk subsystem as possible.

It doesn't seem to be BootCamp drivers available for the card that Apple sells, so I found this card instead:

http://www.areca.com.tw/products/pcietosas1680series.htm

It has EFI firmware and is able to boot MacOSX from raid arrays. The only question is if it is able to boot stuff through Bios emulation.

Vista x64 is the primary target here, and SP1 actually has EFI booting support, so it might be possible to use this. However when I tried to install Vista x64 with SP1 integrated on the MacBook Air I wasn't even able to boot installer DVD because of EFI incompatibilities.

Anyone have any experiences with booting BootCamp on a MacPro with a raid card?

 

[Virtuoso]

I'm looking for a solution myself. This CalDigit RAID card seems to tick all the boxes but I can't find it on sale anywhere yet. One of their reps said they expect to ship mid Feb, so they may start appearing in the retail channel in the next few days.

 

[Beliyaal]

Here is a review of the ARC-1680:
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/areca/1680x/

Although the CalDigit card looks promising I would worry about unproven driver support and that they seem to be a rather small company. Also I don't see anywhere if they support SAS drives, but they should. The 1680 card also has the option to expand to 2 GB write cache.

 

[Gonk42]

Here is a review of the ARC-1680:
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/areca/1680x/

Although the CalDigit card looks promising I would worry about unproven driver support and that they seem to be a rather small company. Also I don't see anywhere if they support SAS drives, but they should. The 1680 card also has the option to expand to 2 GB write cache.

The connectors are described as mini SAS which implies it supports SAS drives (though it is not explicitly stated).

I am interested in the possibility of SAS but with bootcamp. There are lots of posts on the subject but I've not yet found one which relates direct experience of getting it to work. Is it a deliberate policy on Apple's part that they don't support Windows with their RAID card? I'm not bothered about having RAID under Windows, but it would be nice to be able to leave one drive unRAIDed but still bootable for Windows.

I'm dithering on ordering a Mac Pro until the picture is clearer (and FB-DIMM memory prices in the UK drop a bit).