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SAS Drive as a boot drive?

B

Brutus Rex

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 13, 2008
23
0
I would like a fast boot drive and since I was already getting the RAID card option, is there any reason not to get a SAS drive for a boot drive for speed?

1) are they very noisy?
2) i know they are more expensive

I was thinking of:
1) SAS drive for the boot drive
2) 3 samsung f1's 1tb each in a RAID 5 config for file storage for total of 2tb of storage.

Probably use external drive for time machine and use parallels or VMWare for windows xp if I need to.

Thoughts?
 
Well I can speak maybe a little regarding this even though I dont have this exact setup.

I have on my main PC now and as far back as the days of the 486, SCSI drives. Its something I've always spent money on, had and will have.

1) they can be more noisy, especially on seek. My Fujitsu 15K SCSI drives emit a very slight and barely perceptable high pitched whine that I can hear but my friends cant. Almost the sound of a TV being on with no volume. If I put the computer on the floor, then I cant hear it anymore. If its on the desk..I can hear it ever so slightly.

2)It can definitly be more pricey but dont look at it as price per gigabyte. If its for a startup drive, then look at it as performance vs money. Not even a Raptor will match the responsiveness ... not even close. Synthetic benchmarks alone dont tell the story. What looks like a close race in a single task speed test turns into a landslide when you hammer the system hard with assorted disk and cpu tasks and then run the same test.

The only way I can explain it is in car terms. Its got torque. My old mustang was 210HP stock and my current car is about 200HP stock. Very close in performance if I drive with me as the only person in the car. I load the car up with 3 more people and my current car turns gutless where as my old car with more torque almost felt no different than with me along. Not sure if this analogy makes sense but its the only one I got.


Brutus Rex said:
I would like a fast boot drive and since I was already getting the RAID card option, is there any reason not to get a SAS drive for a boot drive for speed?

1) are they very noisy?
2) i know they are more expensive

I was thinking of:
1) SAS drive for the boot drive
2) 3 samsung f1's 1tb each in a RAID 5 config for file storage for total of 2tb of storage.

Probably use external drive for time machine and use parallels or VMWare for windows xp if I need to.

Thoughts?
Click to expand...
 
I think that article is a little bit crazy...There is absolutely no issues what so ever on mixing drives of different rotational speed in the same chassis as long as neither drive exhibits any sever physical vibrations. Heck even system fans that might cause vibrations though a chassis might be an issue.

Different rotational speeds within the same RAID set would be a bad idea and a no-no.
 
scottydawg said:
Keep in mind you can't mix SAS and SATA with the Mac RAID card. I went with 3 SAS because of that or I would have mixed.
Click to expand...

I ordered my Mac with 3 SAS drives. haven't decided on which RAID configuration to use. . I'm thinkin to leave them as is and install MAC OS X on one, the other one for windows XP or Vista 64 bit, the last one for Ubuntu 64 bit. I have 5 external HD for back and time machine.

which configuration did you use?
 
I have the drive in Bay 1 as is, the drives in Bay 2 and 3 are RAID 0. The first drive is the OS and Applications, the RAID is for my user accounts (data).
How are you planning on running Windows, virtual?
 
Akarim47 said:
I ordered my Mac with 3 SAS drives. haven't decided on which RAID configuration to use. . I'm thinkin to leave them as is and install MAC OS X on one, the other one for windows XP or Vista 64 bit, the last one for Ubuntu 64 bit. I have 5 external HD for back and time machine.

which configuration did you use?
Click to expand...

Good Grief Man! Why would you buy those drives and not set up a Stripe set. That is what they are made for. If you want to mix and match Operating Systems, then partition the drives in the stripe set.
 
According to Apple, BootCamp doesn't support SAS.

When I ordered my MP, I considered the RAID card, and ended up calling them. Tech support told me that they currently have no drivers to support the RAID card in Windows or Vista, and implied (if not all-out stated) that it wasn't going to happen any time soon.

I hope that's changed . . . I just looked at the Apple site, and it still says that the RAID card is incompatible with BootCamp.

Stuart
 
sturob said:
According to Apple, BootCamp doesn't support SAS.

When I ordered my MP, I considered the RAID card, and ended up calling them. Tech support told me that they currently have no drivers to support the RAID card in Windows or Vista, and implied (if not all-out stated) that it wasn't going to happen any time soon.

I hope that's changed . . . I just looked at the Apple site, and it still says that the RAID card is incompatible with BootCamp.

Stuart
Click to expand...

That is good information Stuart. thanks for filling us in. So it seems that if you want to go SAS and Raid 0 or 5, and you want to still run another OS like Solaris or Windows, the only option is an external drive. That would be my choice, as a stripe set of SAS drives is a smoking fast configuration.

I wonder what chipset the Apple RAID card uses. At some point we will all be migrating to SSD drives and throughput is an issue when you RAID those. There are other RAID cards out there, but the reviews I've read were not that thorough. Few people have the resources to test several different RAID cards.
 
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