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Specking out a new Mac Pro, I could use some advice Raid card / configuration

At my old job I would have sent it to work too, but not at my current job.
All inbound packages go to the people that own the building and then i'd have to go through paper work to receive it from them and then more paper work to remove it from the building even if it is addressed to me. It is a high security building, it happens to be the primary fiber hub for the South East United States. IE direct fiber lines to other major cities, including NYC and Tokyo.

But sitting at home I got the laundry done and some dusting so it wasn't a complete loss...
It arriaved... :) :) :)
I'm currently making back ups of the OS install discs. I'm hoping the RAM will arrive tomorrow. I was looking at the WD RE3 while sitting here. they are the same price as the Seagate ES class drives but the WD RE3 750GB have a 32MB cache which is appealing...
 
IFixTheInternet said:
At my old job I would have sent it to work too, but not at my current job.
All inbound packages go to the people that own the building and then i'd have to go through paper work to receive it from them and then more paper work to remove it from the building even if it is addressed to me. It is a high security building, it happens to be the primary fiber hub for the South East United States. IE direct fiber lines to other major cities, including NYC and Tokyo.

But sitting at home I got the laundry done and some dusting so it wasn't a complete loss...
It arriaved... :) :) :)
I'm currently making back ups of the OS install discs. I'm hoping the RAM will arrive tomorrow. I was looking at the WD RE3 while sitting here. they are the same price as the Seagate ES class drives but the WD RE3 750GB have a 32MB cache which is appealing...
Click to expand...

:cool:

You might want to look at some of the reviews of the RE3's. Fast. :D
 
nanofrog said:
The idea for keeping the OS on a separate drive is simple. If it fails, you replace the drive, and reload the OS, hopefully from a previous and accurate clone. Simple, and you're done with it. ;)
Click to expand...

I'm certainly not a RAID expert, have only played around a bit recently myself, but thought this comment worth stressing as important. Having the OS on its own drive has allowed me to clone it to another drive and swap drives when needed if I run into an issue (nothing due to drive failures yet, more due to me messing with the system too much - trying to learn heh). Huge time saver.
 
Semiopaque said:
I'm certainly not a RAID expert, have only played around a bit recently myself, but thought this comment worth stressing as important. Having the OS on its own drive has allowed me to clone it to another drive and swap drives when needed if I run into an issue (nothing due to drive failures yet, more due to me messing with the system too much - trying to learn heh). Huge time saver.
Click to expand...
Certainly worth the cost of a drive. ;)

Especially if it takes the array out. :p Data recovery is by no means cheap. :eek: :(
 
nanofrog said:
Data recovery is by no means cheap.
Click to expand...

I found this online for anyone that doubts that comment

"Some vendors charge based on the capacity of the hard disk. Disk Doctors charges $375 to recover data from a 30 GB single hard disk drive running Windows and charges $1,000 for a 500 GB drive. "

MY itunes Library is over 30GB... Hence why I planned on going Raid in the first place.
 
IFixTheInternet said:
I found this online for anyone that doubts that comment

"Some vendors charge based on the capacity of the hard disk. Disk Doctors charges $375 to recover data from a 30 GB single hard disk drive running Windows and charges $1,000 for a 500 GB drive. "

MY itunes Library is over 30GB... Hence why I planned on going Raid in the first place.
Click to expand...
It gets far worse when the recovery is a RAID array. To give you an idea, 8TB's were quoted at something around $28k :eek: to a friend recently due to a poorly designed RAID controller for the specific application*. :( Given that much $$$, the data stayed lost. :rolleyes: The reason is, the recovery is more complicated, as they would have to recreate the Partition Tables by hand. (Why I look for cards with the backup copy of PT's feature). ;)

* CalDigit RAID card used to span internal and external drives into a single array (RAID 5).
 
Semiopaque said:
I'm certainly not a RAID expert, have only played around a bit recently myself, but thought this comment worth stressing as important. Having the OS on its own drive has allowed me to clone it to another drive and swap drives when needed if I run into an issue (nothing due to drive failures yet, more due to me messing with the system too much - trying to learn heh). Huge time saver.
Click to expand...

I agree...especially after having read this:

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20090106231519591

Without a way to easily boot off another drive you'll have a hard time getting back to your RAID.
 
hayduke said:
I agree...especially after having read this:

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20090106231519591

Without a way to easily boot off another drive you'll have a hard time getting back to your RAID.
Click to expand...
Nice find :), particularly since I do have a preference for Areca's products. :eek:

If it affects the ARC-1220, it will also affect the ARC-1680 series as well, as they're both SAS RAID controllers, and use the same firmware & drivers.

User's of either may also want to keep in mind, that Areca has a Beta version of firmware (9/15/08?) that might help in combination with the new driver (released on 12/23/08). In a not too old communication with Areca, they indicated that it was "highly recommended" and solved some issues the previous version couldn't.

Since it became available, it's the version shipped on their SAS products. This may be the reason some are having success while others haven't. Just an idea anyway. ;)
 
nanofrog said:
:cool:

You might want to look at some of the reviews of the RE3's. Fast. :D
Click to expand...

Please excuse a noobie question. I see this drive well reviewed and priced (here in the UK) but with no mention of Mac or PC applicability I am unsure if I can simply install it and expect Disk Utility to format it correctly or whether it will turn out to have some low level Windows format that the Mac can't handle (which seems to be the case with some old PC USB external drives I tried to repurpose for a MacBook).

Chris
 
chrisjk said:
Please excuse a noobie question. I see this drive well reviewed and priced (here in the UK) but with no mention of Mac or PC applicability I am unsure if I can simply install it and expect Disk Utility to format it correctly or whether it will turn out to have some low level Windows format that the Mac can't handle (which seems to be the case with some old PC USB external drives I tried to repurpose for a MacBook).

Chris
Click to expand...
It will work. :D
 
chrisjk said:
Please excuse a noobie question. I see this drive well reviewed and priced (here in the UK) but with no mention of Mac or PC applicability I am unsure if I can simply install it and expect Disk Utility to format it correctly or whether it will turn out to have some low level Windows format that the Mac can't handle (which seems to be the case with some old PC USB external drives I tried to repurpose for a MacBook).

Chris
Click to expand...

I have never had a compatibility probables with any SATA hard drives in a Mac. IDE drives yes but never with SATA. You should have no problems.
 
Classes start today, I'm excited. I can actually put this beast to work. I'm still waiting for the raid card and HDs. An unexpected vehicular repair set my budget schedule back a weeks paycheck. Such is the life of a workign student....

Here is a question... On my dual core MBP my activity monitor shows two cores each with their individual activity boxes. The mac pro shows one larger box and so far I have barely been able to get it to budge on the activity monitor. I know Maya will put it to work put I was really expecting to see 8 boxes or at the very least two (one per CPU)... Any ideas on how to change that view or why apple has decided to go with one all encompassing activity monitor as opposed to per processor or per core?
 
I finally order the HDs 4 WD RE3 750GB.
I have wonder around my school and spoken with a few people who have raided their HDs the best I found was a guy with three 500gb raid0. I was surprised to find of the numerous Mac Pros in the building no one has made use of the 4 internal bays. A few I've talked to have implied I'm overdoing it by going Raid5....

Am I paranoid or prepaid?
 
IFixTheInternet said:
I finally order the HDs 4 WD RE3 750GB.
I have wonder around my school and spoken with a few people who have raided their HDs the best I found was a guy with three 500gb raid0. I was surprised to find of the numerous Mac Pros in the building no one has made use of the 4 internal bays. A few I've talked to have implied I'm overdoing it by going Raid5....

Am I paranoid or prepaid?
Click to expand...
Wait until they have a failure, then ask yourself if you're paranoid. :p
Especially with consumer drives. :D
 
For the future, you might want to consider ATA over Ethernet.
What it boils down to is that you get enterprise class performance at a fraction of the cost.

Get any old computer case, but make sure there's plenty of space for HDs.

Get a some budget hardware (Sempron processor, 2GB RAM) and some semi-decent hardare (Motherboard with integrated graphics and as many SATA ports as possible -- you could of course get a cheap GFX card if the mobo you find doesn't have onboard GFX).
These days, it seems most mobos do 6 - 8 SATA ports which is a great start.
Remember that you can always buy SATA controller cards with anything from two to sixteen SATA ports on them for future expansion.

Get some disks -- I'd go with a four 1TB WD Green Power disks to start off with, and a 16GB - 32GB *fast* SSD for the OS (ensuring that booting the diskarray takes a few seconds only).
I.e., you don't need 10k RPM or 15k RPM, or even 7.2k RPM.

Install a linux dist on the OS disk -- any of the major ones should do just fine, though I'd probably go with ubuntu server LTS.
Make sure the storage disks are plugged in, but don't format them.

Install the ATA over Ethernet tools and export the disks.
Connect the machines with a network cable.
Install the ATA over Ethernet tools on your Mac Pro and search for the disks.

RAID and format them as you please (remember that while rendering does use a "fair bit" of CPU, you have a beast of a machine, and the RAID doesn't use a lot of it).
I'd probably go with a RAID-10 ensuring reliability and speed, though you'd be better off with a 6-disk RAID-10.

Now, for less than the cost of just the Apple RAID card, you have a very decent SAN easily doing 100MB+ per second.
If you need it faster than that, use 10Gbps network cards.

When you need more storage, get a 8 or 16 port SATA controller card and plug in some new disks into it.

With SL, you'd be able to run ZFS on top of your "little" RAID array; even running z-raid if you want to.

If you don't want to build the storage machine yourself, you can get prebuilt, supported ones from coraid.
It's most likely the best way to get great storage at a minimal cost to the Mac Pro.

If you don't want to buy 10Gbps ports (which would get yo uspeeds of 1GB/second if you have enough disks), you can always use "bonding" to couple several network cards together.
For more info, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_over_Ethernet or throw me a PM ;)
 
rylin said:
For the future, you might want to consider ATA over Ethernet.
What it boils down to is that you get enterprise class performance at a fraction of the cost.

Get any old computer case, but make sure there's plenty of space for HDs.

Get a some budget hardware (Sempron processor, 2GB RAM) and some semi-decent hardare (Motherboard with integrated graphics and as many SATA ports as possible -- you could of course get a cheap GFX card if the mobo you find doesn't have onboard GFX).
These days, it seems most mobos do 6 - 8 SATA ports which is a great start.
Remember that you can always buy SATA controller cards with anything from two to sixteen SATA ports on them for future expansion.

Get some disks -- I'd go with a four 1TB WD Green Power disks to start off with, and a 16GB - 32GB *fast* SSD for the OS (ensuring that booting the diskarray takes a few seconds only).
I.e., you don't need 10k RPM or 15k RPM, or even 7.2k RPM.

Install a linux dist on the OS disk -- any of the major ones should do just fine, though I'd probably go with ubuntu server LTS.
Make sure the storage disks are plugged in, but don't format them.

Install the ATA over Ethernet tools and export the disks.
Connect the machines with a network cable.
Install the ATA over Ethernet tools on your Mac Pro and search for the disks.

RAID and format them as you please (remember that while rendering does use a "fair bit" of CPU, you have a beast of a machine, and the RAID doesn't use a lot of it).
I'd probably go with a RAID-10 ensuring reliability and speed, though you'd be better off with a 6-disk RAID-10.

Now, for less than the cost of just the Apple RAID card, you have a very decent SAN easily doing 100MB+ per second.
If you need it faster than that, use 10Gbps network cards.

When you need more storage, get a 8 or 16 port SATA controller card and plug in some new disks into it.

With SL, you'd be able to run ZFS on top of your "little" RAID array; even running z-raid if you want to.

If you don't want to build the storage machine yourself, you can get prebuilt, supported ones from coraid.
It's most likely the best way to get great storage at a minimal cost to the Mac Pro.

If you don't want to buy 10Gbps ports (which would get yo uspeeds of 1GB/second if you have enough disks), you can always use "bonding" to couple several network cards together.
For more info, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_over_Ethernet or throw me a PM ;)
Click to expand...
I know. :D
Cheap, fast SAN. ;)

A perfect use for an older, unused or underused system, and my preferred method of backup storage. :D :p
 
I think I'm going to have to wing it with I got. Though the insight is very useful, I'm sure when I get out of school and looking to start into the business world, I will need to acquire large quantities of repayable storage and your suggestion might be a good place to start. Still waiting on hardware to arrive...
Waiting hurts my feelings....
 
IFixTheInternet said:
Given this is my only desktop and my most under used machine is a powerbook 1.25GHz 1.5GB I am rebuilding to give to my sister, I think I'm going to have to wing it with I got. Though the insight is very useful, I'm sure when I get out of school and looking to start into the business world, I will need to acquire large quantities of repayable storage and your suggestion might be a good place to start. Still waiting on hardware to arrive...
Waiting hurts my feelings....
Click to expand...
Waiting for New Toy Anxiety. Oh Yeah! :D :p
 
my drives finally arrived, but sadly i'm still waiting on the card
I ordered it but then found out that despite the advertisement the card did not come with the battery back up and that would be an additional $140. So I canceled the order and had to reorder it.... And of course every where I look they are on back order.... I swear.. nothing is ever easy.... In other news I have been told that running vista 64 bit through boot camp would actually allow faster rendering times in maya ( the application i use the most) so I am tempted to try it and see how well it works... Any body got experinse with maya 2009 on vista running on a mac?
 
In the end I have ordered a 23" SATAII cable straight to 90 degree, a 4 pin to SATA power adapter, and a 5.25 to 3.5 mounting bracket, 4 2GB FB-DIMM memory sticks, 4 - 750GB Western Digital RE3 hard drives, and a Caldigit Raid Card with battery back up. The only thing that hasn't arrived yet is the card, it should come in tomorrow. I can't wait to get this thing in, and running, though I'm fairly sure I'm going to need to let the battery charge overnight before I bother doing anything with it. Hopefully I won't break anything when I'm doing all this....
 
All installed configured to Raid6 gives me 1.4 TB of storage. After moving everything I have over to the Array, and deleting all the duplicates of files I had on various back up drives. I doubt I'll run out of space anytime soon and I can sleep easier knowing my data is much safer then it was before. Thanks to all who gave em recommendations and advice.
 
nanofrog said:
I know. :D
Cheap, fast SAN. ;)

A perfect use for an older, unused or underused system, and my preferred method of backup storage. :D :p
Click to expand...

Except it's not a SAN. It's akin to an iSCSI attached NAS. Run ZFS on OpenSolaris and you'll give yourself even more control and redundancy.
 
Trip.Tucker said:
Except it's not a SAN. It's akin to an iSCSI attached NAS. Run ZFS on OpenSolaris and you'll give yourself even more control and redundancy.
Click to expand...
I'd like to run ZFS, preferably RAID-Z. But it's not practical ATM, due to my software requirements. Not yet anyway. Hopefully, this will change sooner than later.
 
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