SATA RAID card recommendations

[carlosparamio]

Hi there,

I have a Mac Pro 2008 running Snow Leopard, with 4 WD RE4-GP (WD2002FYPS) SATA 3Gbps hard drives. I recently bought a Sans Digital TowerRaid TR8X enclosure for SAS/SATA drives with two SFF-8088 connectors, plus a RocketRaid 4322 SAS/SATA RAID card, to move these disks to the external enclosure, expand capacity by buying more disks, and mount them on RAID 6.

I had to return the RR 4322 card because I suffered constant freezes when transferring files to the RAID volume. I know that the disks are SATA (no SAS) and that might be the source of issues, but I thinked that a SAS/SATA RAID card like the 4322 would work well with them. Or maybe it was just the same issues others seemed to have with this card and Snow Leopard.

In any case, I still have to buy a SATA or SAS/SATA RAID card to connect to my enclosure through the miniSAS interface, Snow Leopard compatible, and preferably that works well with the SATA drives I already have. Any recommendations? nanofrog? 🙂

I'm ok with a SATA RAID card, but because the enclosure supports also SAS drives, it would be better if the card supports both SAS and SATA drives... just in case I decide to go with the SAS drives in the future.

Thanks in advance.

 

[carlosparamio]

These are the cards I've found for now, I'm not sure if they will work fine:

Areca ARC-1680X (http://www.sansdigital.com/adapters/ha-arc-arc1680x.html)

Atto R380 (http://www.attotech.com/products/product.php?cat=10&scat=19&sku=ESAS-R380-000)

Is a battery module recommended to increase write performance? I like the Atto, but it seems that they don't have a battery module for it for now. Can the RAID volume become corrupted without the battery? (I have a UPS, but it sometimes - rarely, but it happens - fails).

 

[Oldschoolwax]

did you pull the card and do a hard reboot/install newest drivers from SI/ plug in SD box and boot? Some people have had luck with that. Sans can be a PITA to deal with.... But some of the new drivers, even the beta ones seem to be working quite well, knock aluminum!

 

[carlosparamio]

I even manually removed the system drivers (I think it was /System/Library/Extensions/HighPoint.kext) and then reinstall the latest drivers downloaded from the Highpoint website (RR3xxx_4xxx-mac106-driver-v204-092809.dmg), doing a cold restart in the middle. But as soon as I started to copy a bunch of files, the transfer stopped, and trying to access to the web UI then has no effect (the browser raised a timeout after some seconds).

Anyway, I can't test the RR anymore because I already returned it.

I will go for the Atto card. I've been in communication with support, and the only thing they don't have on their laboratories is the TR8X enclosure. But they say that, because of the specifications, it should work without problems.