MP 1,1-5,1 RAID 10, SoftRAID or Disk Utility?

[Grumply]

Hi guys,

Haven't been able to find much info on this. I have a software license for SoftRAID, and like the monitoring tools it provides. But I'm wondering if anyone can speak to general performance or reliability between 4-drive RAID 10 arrays in the Mac Pro 5,1 using the internal Disk Utility and Softraid?

Are there any significant differences or benefits between the two?

This would be for a Media Storage drive, the OS will sit on an SSD in the Optical Bay.

Cheers

 

[lilk0na]

Here's OWC's new 2 TB Accelsior 4M2 card.... speed may be down since I moved the failing iTunes drive to it after SoftRAID spotted it as failing. However I am getting only half speed as expected on PCIe 2 16x. I am looking forward to testing it as scratch once my new 2tb data ssd arrives. I have a thunderbolt raid on my mini and preferred disk utility to SoftRaid there but I don't remember why.
I can't see the point of storing my media on the card long term, it will stay on a crucial BX500. I'll only use this for faster transfer and at some point will move my OS to a single card leaving the other three for raid.

 

[startergo]

Is it RAID0?

 

[deconstruct60]

Hi guys,

Haven't been able to find much info on this. I have a software license for SoftRAID, and like the monitoring tools it provides. But I'm wondering if anyone can speak to general performance or reliability between 4-drive RAID 10 arrays in the Mac Pro 5,1 using the internal Disk Utility and Softraid?

If this is a 4 drive HDD array than SoftRAID's drive health monitoring is more than substantially better than the "Disk Utility" solution. That isn't a 'performance' difference but it is a functionality difference.

SoftRAID's predicative powers on SSD's is as big of a differential. They fail in different ways that SoftRAID's heuristics don't have deep insight on at this point.

 

[bob_stan]

I have used Softraid for drives in two Thunderbay enclosures in a Raid 10 configuration for over 5 years. They have worked perfectly. Even though I had 2 drives fail during that period, no data was lost and the failed drives were easily replaced.

 

[lilk0na]

Is it RAID0?

Comes as raid 0 from OWC. I changed nothing just filled it up.

 

[kittiyut]

Can disk utility do RAID 5?

 

[Ludacrisvp]

Can disk utility do RAID 5?

4 drive RAID 5 isnt really too valuable but no disk utility wont do it.
I’d say RAID10 is the safest way to be fast with large HDDs when you have 4 large drives.
That being said its also kind of painful getting disk utility to do raid 10, and to replace a failed drive you have to use the command line to do it (I’ve done it using apples software raid 10)