1000MB/s on MacPro

[Vincent Rice]

Interesting review of the latest SATA expansion cards from Tempo. Allows the use of up to 20 drives.


http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/sonnet/mac-pro/

 

[Hoffmann Films]

now that looks interesting...

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

now that looks interesting...

Interesting? It's just an eSATA card, of which there are several available -- even more so on the PC. vs. the Mac. It would be far more interesting if it had an onboard RAID controller and cache system. Managing 20 drives via software RAID doesn't thrill me all that much.

But yeah, eSATA is the way to go for external RAIDs these days. Fiber channel is nice and still better overall, but the price is nuts for fiber connected RAID systems like the XServe RAID.

 

[Rob Lohman]

I've seen SATA cards that can handle 24 drives and probably more. Obviously that's targeted to the server market and is probably Windows / Unix only.

 

[Vincent Rice]

Its interesting because of the cost and the Mac focus. If you have the budget then an Xsan system would be the obvious route but most of us don't.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Its interesting because of the cost and the Mac focus. If you have the budget then an Xsan system would be the obvious route but most of us don't.

But it's just a $299 eSATA II card... The only real advantage is Sonnet's 500P or whatever enclosure that has built-in eSATA switch so you can connect multiple drives to a single eSATA connector. However, I'd glady pay a little more any day for an enclosure with a true RAID controller... As it is, the enclosures just use a switch (which anyone can buy and we don't need Sonnet's enclosure to do it) and all the drives appear on your system as individual drives. If you want to do RAID configs, it's all via software through the disk manager. ...This is not that great of a solution.

I'll have to go searching about a bit and see what's out there for the Mac... In PC land there's tons and tons of options like this and may of them better for the same money. Too bad 3Ware doesn't support OSX...

 

[Carl-August Savgård]

http://www.coraid.com/

SATA over Ethernet. Should be a great option for archival porposes... and if you don't need superfast storage.

True raid controller.
Platform independent.

I've never tried it... anyone?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I've never tried it... anyone?

Slow.

Good for "live" backups or secondary storage for your network/SAN. Not much good for anything else. It's not fast enough to stream any significant media to multiple clients or handle data rates even approaching what large drive systems / RAID setups can do. Only up to 110Mbps per AoE connection...

I really can't image what I would actually use one of their products for. Some of the smaller 4 drive units could make for a simplistic storage solution for serving low-bandwidth web services. But given that for about $300 more (comparing the 1U, 4-drive model), you can buy a decent NAS box that can actually saturate both of its gigE interfaces and is routable and a lot more configurable and controllable. So I'm stumped, actually... Because when I'm talking about spending $300 more, I'm thinking of buying a Dell NAS unit. I can build one myself and run BSD or Linux on it for a lot less.

 

[Chris Kenny]

But it's just a $299 eSATA II card... The only real advantage is Sonnet's 500P or whatever enclosure that has built-in eSATA switch so you can connect multiple drives to a single eSATA connector. However, I'd glady pay a little more any day for an enclosure with a true RAID controller...

If Leopard really has ZFS as rumored, then you might want to use that despite the CPU overhead. With typical software RAID systems, the only real benefit is price, but ZFS provides a lot more flexibility than any hardware-based RAID system I've ever heard of, and better data integrity features as well.

Even leaving ZFS aside, I think the value of a dedicated RAID controller is not what it once was. This is particularly true on multi-core systems, where odds are the process you're running can't max out all the cores anyway. And remember that the Mac Pro towers will probably be 8-core (dual quad) by the time RED ships.