Q about SATA and SAS on new Mac Pro...

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Yeah, I'm seeing some reports online about the battery reconditioning... Yikes. Recharge times are all over the place, some people reporting just a few hours, some reporting days. WTF? I guess I'll see what happens...

My SAS drive should be here tuesday according to FedEx. I'll put it in and see how well it performs.

 

[Chase Gordon]

My SAS drive should be here tuesday according to FedEx. I'll put it in and see how well it performs.

I'm sure you'll notice the improvement. Let me know what you think of the noise.

I've borrowed a Cheetah 15K.5 for now, waiting until the 15K.6 come out (due by end of March). The .6 are spec'd as faster than my RAID array! 164 MB/s

For me, though, this is mostly tweaking just for fun. Until REDCINE works, I won't be generating anything where my current disks are the limiting factor.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

...On fedex vehicle for delivery. I'll throw it in tonight and see what it does.

Those 15K.6 units look very nice. Good to see capacities going up too, even if 460GB is still the largest one.

Hopefully REDCINE really improves with the next release, its current state is pretty sad. IMO, it shouldn't even be considered "beta" software. More like "alpha" or proof of concept. When REDCINE does behave itself, I've found DPX output at full quality from 4K to 2K and some better filter settings will run at about 14 to 18 fps on this system since the RAID isn't a bottleneck. So once we get a good way to confirm via REDTRIP or even direct R3D integration in FCP, I'm not worried about render times to conform to 2K. 4K takes nearly 4X as long, but it is 4X the amount of data... Either way, the render farm looks like the answer -- too bad most of my render nodes are too outdated to run the software. Mostly AMD MP systems, but maybe REDLINE will work once released.

 

[Chase Gordon]

Cables to convert your SATA to eSATA ports

Cables to convert your SATA to eSATA ports

FYI, I got the motherboard SATA ports connected to an eSATA bracket in the dummy PCI slot. (There are two PCI slot ports to support a double-height video card in the single PCI slot 1. Since I only have a single height card, the nVidia GeForce 8800 GT, I have a free external PCI port that is not associated with a free PCI slot, and this is where I put the bracket, so I still have full access to the empty PCI slots.)


Turns out the cable from Newark works, but is not the best deal. It would be better (and probably cheaper and faster) to get a standard SFF-8087 (controller) to 4x SATA (backplane) cable 0.5 meters long, as this would be long enough to reach the external port bracket and not need to be shipped from the UK.

[Follow up. This cabling worked OK for one drive, but not for 2 or more, due to cable length exceeding the 1 meter limit for SATA. I did have to replace the Newark cable with the half meter cable, specifically the Adaptec ACK-I-mSASx4-4SATAx1 0.5m R and had to be careful to use hard-to-find half meter eSATA cables rather than the more common one meter cables in order to get this to work with more than one drive at a time. Also, the half meter internal cable is much cleaner and just the right length: no extra slack bouncing around.]

This mostly seems to work. I had a weird issue with Bootcamp in that I couldn't install it on the eSATA drive unless I booted from the eSATA drive. Also the Mac really doesn't like it when a SATA drive disappears. I'd be very worried about swapping drives without rebooting the Mac. But I have successfully run Windows XP SP2 from the eSATA drive and though it doesn't see the RAID cards, it does work and see all 8 cores.

I'm also having another issue that once I boot into XP it only sees 2GB of memory. And there are some odd delays now and then. I doubt either of these have to do with the RAID card but you never know. [I now suspect the delays were also eSATA cabling issues.]

On the other hand, VMWare Fusion works well and has minimal overhead in the tests I've run (less than 5% performance penalty) except for graphics performance. It's also limited to 2 cores. But unlike Bootcamp, I can still use my RAID array. The only reasons I see to use Bootcamp instead of Fusion: You need access to the graphics card, e.g. for gaming or GPU acceleration of video processing, you need hardware access to the hardware ports, e.g. to reprogram the firmware in a FireWire device, or you have software that can take advantage of more than 2 cores and you want to do that.

The VMWare clone of my ancient Win2K (Athlon 1500) machine that I have kicking around for those times when I simply MUST use windows is 3-6 times as fast as the real hardware machine in everything but graphics and at least as fast in graphics. If I can get something to give me serial COM1 and COM2 ports then I can kiss that old machine goodbye.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I haven't posted an update to this thread for a while, but here goes...

I agree on the ipass cable from Newark. I ended up not installing it since I already threw that CalDigit 4-port eSATA PCI-e card in the system. A friend of mine has a Mac Pro as well and connected is motherboard ODD SATA headers to an external bracket. It has been non-stop headaches for him as the ports are not properly supported under XP / Vista and are not given full functionality as eSATA ports. They're just SATA ports that have been piped out of the box. ...Both OSX and Windows complain when drives disappear and it's probably best to re-boot if swapping drives or whatnot with this approach.

I returned my SAS drive to the vendor, no re-stock fee after I chatted with them a bit.

Now for the meat... I can boot Vista via bootcamp from the RAID card. Unfortunately, still no drivers for the RAID card under windows, so the performance just plain sucks, no way to access or see any volumes on the RAID. It's just the boot segment of the EFI system providing enough info to boot from the given partition. It was a pain to install and get running and I'm going to wipe it off anyway since it performs poorly running from the RAID controller and likes to hang. I installed Vista64 Ultimate on an eSATA drive and then made an image of that drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. Cloned that image to the bootcamp partition and then it essentially forces the boot from the bootcamp OS chooser menu. Half the time it hangs during boot-up.

I have been meaning to give vmware fusion a try. I'm familiar with Parallels and it's worked pretty good so far on my macbook pro. It does have some options for GPU acceleration that fusion does not. But it tends to only work with specific software (mostly just games). Parallels is also limited to using two CPU cores and I've found the way it handles USB devices, as well as the mounting of removable media, to be a little screwy sometimes.

Your XP installation only showing 2GB RAM is probably due to not having proper chipset drivers installed. Could be other things, but that's the most likely cause. You may need to have XP start with the "/3GB switch" to force the OS to restrain itself within the first 1GB and leave the remaining 3GB of 32bit address space for applications. However, you will only see about 3.2~3.5 GB of total RAM under a 32bit OS on this system.

 

[tugboat]

Hey all, just reading through this post and have a few questions.

I currently own a quad 2.66 with 5 discs, 3x10k raptors in raid 0 (internal) a boot camp drive (ancient 8MB sata 120Gb) a small 120GB time machine disc and a 250GB Usb External.

A good friend has a 146/7 GB SAS 15k Fijitsu and I would love to use this as a Photoshop scratch disc. I noticed talk of an inexpensive Highpoint controller that could allow me to have an external SAS (I think a 2322).

So I guess my question is if this config would be possible:

3 x 10k 74GB raptors (internal SATA)
1 x 146 15k SAS (External)
2 x external E-Sata with 2 x 500GB drives (Vantec E-Sata Cases on the Aux SATA ports in the Mac Pro) One to boot windows / One storage

And this can be done with the very economical 2322 by Highpoint, or I'm losing my mind? (quite possible!)

Thanks in advance!

 

[Chase Gordon]

So I guess my question is if this config would be possible:

3 x 10k 74GB raptors (internal SATA)
1 x 146 15k SAS (External)
2 x external E-Sata with 2 x 500GB drives (Vantec E-Sata Cases on the Aux SATA ports in the Mac Pro) One to boot windows / One storage

And this can be done with the very economical 2322 by Highpoint, or I'm losing my mind? (quite possible!)

I don't know about the Highpoint controller. As far as I know, you cannot boot a Boot Camp drive off the aux SATA ports. According to your configuration you should still have one primary SATA bay available; you should put the Boot Camp drive there.

 

[tugboat]

Hello again, just got my 8 core 2.8, decided to do a different setup with some of the new velo raptors. I'm a little unclear about the performance and reliability of these odd sata ports still though. Is it a bad idea to use the pair for an external esata 500GB and a 250GB time machine drive? Thanks guys.

 

[Chase Gordon]

A few more things you should know

A few more things you should know

Following up in case anyone else comes across this thread.

One thing I didn't realize is that the on board SATA ports are limited to a cable length of 1 meter while eSATA in general is limited to 2 meters. It is VERY hard to find an eSATA cable under 1 meter, meaning any of these eSATA setups are out of spec. While I was successful in using 2 feet of cabling inside my Mac and a 1 meter eSATA cable outside when using one drive, by the time I connected 2 drives there was no hope: the Mac hung (and painfully so) quickly or else it didn't even bother to recognize 1 of the 2 drives.

My new plan is to get the half meter internal cable and the only half meter eSATA cable I could find, the Tripp Lite P950-18I.

Note that I'm even more of a VMware convert now that VMware Fusion 2.0 is out. I just love it. I'm only doing the eSATA thing so I can do high-speed external disk-to-disk copies.

Also, I found that Keyspan makes a USB to Serial adapter that I can use to provide a COM serial port (though I use it as COM 3, not sure if I can get it to be COM 1): Keyspan USA-19HS (USA = USB Serial Adapter, HS=High Speed). Works with my clunky old Win2K software under VMware, so I'm happy.

I also got the Paragon NTFS for Mac kernel extension that lets me WRITE to NTFS drives as well as read from them. The only trick there is that when formatting NTFS drives from MacOS, you have to select a Master Boot Record style partition, which is not the default for Mac. So I've got my Mac writing to external NTFS drives that I then take to post houses that are running Scratch or Avid on Windows machines and the biggest problem is the crappy FireWire support on Windows.

 

[Nook Kim]

How about something like this? Would this work well?

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/MPQXES2/

 

[Chase Gordon]

How about something like this? Would this work well?

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/MPQXES2/

You can read about it in much greater detail in several places on the net. It has the following problems:

1) Due to cable length, it can only fit in the top slot. This means that if you have an Apple Raid card (which, due to cable length, can only fit in the top slot), then you can't use it.
2) It connects to on board SATA ports that are meant for optical disk drives (low performance) and are not seen by Windows under Boot Camp. So they are not as good as using the main SATA ports. In particular, you cannot boot a Boot Camp partition off them or use drives connected to them under Boot Camp.
3) As I mentioned in my previous post, they're still really only SATA ports, not eSATA ports, and as a result you are at risk of having trouble due to cable lengths.

For the most part, I'd advise getting a real eSATA card instead.

 

[Nook Kim]

Thanks for your advice. Much appreciated!

 

[Chase Gordon]

Yeah, I'm seeing some reports online about the battery reconditioning... Yikes. Recharge times are all over the place, some people reporting just a few hours, some reporting days. WTF? I guess I'll see what happens...

My RAID card took several days (3 charge/discharge cycles, if I recall correctly) before it came up to full charge. That battery finally failed only 9 months later. Fortunately still under AppleCare, Apple completely replaced the card rather than replacing just the battery. I hope when it's out of warranty replacing the battery only will be an option.