what real raid card will work with owc's quad

[philipma1957]

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/RAID/Desktop/


I have two of these. I am buying a 2010 mac pro 2.8 quad with an eye to expand piece by piece/

I would like to know what cards would be good atto? rocketraid ?. I would have my mac pro with an internal ssd. the better graphics card and add these two external raid cases. A single card with 2 esata ports sounds nice. but i am open to ideas. also does anyone have the owc unit

{mercury elite-al pro qx2} in use with a macpro? if some one does please let me know how it works I want esata hookup info

 

[Transporteur]

You don't need a hardware RAID controller for these external enclosures.

The RAID level is completely handled by the (fake) controller in the box itself.
Since the boxes only have a single eSATA connector, all you need is a simple eSATA card that supports port multiplying.

You can use a cheap SIL3232 based card for it (which is what I use to connect a similar external device to my Pro), I would however not recommend it since the throughput is pretty low for an eSATA connection (~115MB/s sustained).

The NewerTech eSATA card however should perform much better.

 

[philipma1957]

thank you

 

[nanofrog]

I would like to know what cards would be good atto? rocketraid ?. I would have my mac pro with an internal ssd. the better graphics card and add these two external raid cases. A single card with 2 esata ports sounds nice. but i am open to ideas. also does anyone have the owc unit

The OWC product will throttle on you, if you try to run more than 1x SSD in it (it claims 300MB/s, and the disks claim up to 285MB/s). You'd need SATA 6.0Gb/s compliance and enough lanes it can get over 600MB/s, which means a 4x lane card.

The Newertech card Transporteur mentioned will work up to 500MB/s (1x lane Gen. 2.0 card), so it's possible it will throttle on occasion as well. But it's not terribly expensive either.

Past that, is a non-RAID card from ATTO (look here; note that they start with an H, not R = RAID; numbers and letters after the first remain the same in the family), and they're quite a bit more money. They do provide more ports though, as they start at 8 ports (external only example; gives the cost). But there's a hybrid = 4 internal + 4 external as well. Definitely cheaper than the RAID versions.

The RAID level is completely handled by the (fake) controller in the box itself.

In this case, they're using an Oxford 936SE chip, which is an RoC (step up fron a Fake RAID controller). But it's not going to be sufficient for SSD's anyway (it's still a cheap solution, and only 3.0Gb/s compliant).

You can use a cheap SIL3232 based card for it (which is what I use to connect a similar external device to my Pro), I would however not recommend it since the throughput is pretty low for an eSATA connection (~115MB/s sustained).

Different situation, and it's too slow for SSD's anyway, especially if they're in a stripe set (which I'll presume is the case until notified otherwise).

BTW, have you gotten one of the Newertech cards (PM support model) to get better throughputs?

 

[philipma1957]

I would put 2tb hdds in the external owc I have some wd re4 I would use them.

 

[Transporteur]

BTW, have you gotten one of the Newertech cards (PM support model) to get better throughputs?

Not yet. I can live with the 115MB/s for now, which is why I wait for a decent controller that has both internal and external SATAIII connectors. New SSDs (except for the Intel G3 which I quite frankly don't understand) are coming with SATAIII so it would make an easy upgrade for my Pro.