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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

4 drive internal raid in a macpro?

Evin Grant

Evin Grant

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Hey post production party people,
I'd like to install a 4 drive (4x 2TB) RAID 5 array inside my Macpro Tower.
I know this is possible with the Highpoint Rocket Raid cards but I'm wondering if any of you have done this and can recommend a particular card model.

Ideally I'd like to also have some external e-sata capability from this card either natively or through a SAS breakout cable.

My system drive will live in the spare Optical drive bay and be plugged into one of the spare SATA ports on the motherboard.

Any advice or direction would be greatly appreciated.
E.
 
Evin Grant said:
Hey post production party people,
I'd like to install a 4 drive (4x 2TB) RAID 5 array inside my Macpro Tower.
I know this is possible with the Highpoint Rocket Raid cards but I'm wondering if any of you have done this and can recommend a particular card model.

Ideally I'd like to also have some external e-sata capability from this card either natively or through a SAS breakout cable.

My system drive will live in the spare Optical drive bay and be plugged into one of the spare SATA ports on the motherboard.

Any advice or direction would be greatly appreciated.
E.
Click to expand...

I have a 4 drive (4 x 300 GB) SAS Raid that I use as my projects drive (media drive is Xserve RAID), but plenty fast enough to playback renders I get from animators, music files, etc. Having my projects and graphics on a fast raid rocks. It's all stock Apple stuff... controller card that is... I don't think they sell it anymore, bought back in '08. So no help with hardware specifics, but this configuration is a very good idea, I love the speed.
 
For SATA HDD, you can look at ARC-1210 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131003&cm_re=1210-_-16-131-003-_-Product)
For SAS HDD (slightly better performance), you can look at ARC-1212 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816151038&cm_re=1212-_-16-151-038-_-Product)

For performance figures, you can refer to benchmark posted at CineRAID 4 bay solution as they encorporate Areca RAID controller in all their products. http://www.cineraid.com/editpro4.htm

I am recommending Areca because it will offer higher performance than highpoint. (although slightly higher price tag as well)
 
Hi Richard,

I'd recommend the Atto line, it's what a lot of high end vendors (e.g. MaxDigital) use and I've been very happy with mine, and for your particular usage the R348 can be configured to have four internal ports, and a sas connector on the back to add additional drives or an external storage unit.

Depending on which MacPro you have, you may be able to re-purpose one of the sata ports on the motherboard for an extra e-sata connection.

I've got an eight drive array in one of my macpro's and it's all good.

Hope this helps,

Steve
 
Which model of Mac Pro are we talking about here? If it's a 2006 model, no problem, if it's a 2008 model - even better. If it's a 2009 model, it takes some extra work.

The '08 Mac Pro has the easiest access to the 4 internal drive bays via the mini SAS (iPASS) cable. You can disconnect that from the logic board and connect it to a RAID card like the HighPoint, Areca, ATTO or CalDigit cards, I think you will need an adapter for all but the CalDigit card, IIRC. You're in business, 4 drives in a RAID... Then you have two SATA connectors on the logic board, labeled ODD_1 & 2. Pretty easy to snake a couple SATA cables up to the optical bays and you can boot from them or whatever. There are mounting brackets you can get that let you mount 2 3.5" HDDs in a single 5.25" bay. So you can have 6 HDDs in the Mac Pro plus your optical drive. Or just mount one HDD and then use the other SATA cable to connect to a Blu-Ray. I suppose you could always go all out on internal HDDs and eliminate the internal optical bay and run 2 off the SATA connectors and 2 more off the EIDE/ATA connectors.

In a 2009 Mac Pro, there is no iPASS cable. The SATA/SAS header is hard-wired right to the connector backplane on the logic board. If you're ambitious with good soldering skills, you can bypass and connect your own RAID card, but it's not worth even thinking about it, IMO. There are no free SATA headers, unless you have an unused optical bay. You can still put a system drive in that optical bay easily. And then you can hook up the 4 internal HDDs to your RAID controller, but it takes a little work. Easiest way is to get some replacement drive sleds that can be modded to flip the HDDs around or mount them a bit further from the SATA back-plane. Then run cables direct from them to your RAID controller. You will need extensions for the power connectors or a way to route power to them as well. It's a pain, but I've seen it done. I've almost done it to mine a few times, but I just run an internal 3-drive RAID-0 as a big scratch disk mostly. Then keep all my serious storage as an external RAID.

I would also recommend the ATTO cards -- great support. ARECA is great too. I would take either of those over the HighPoint cards.
 
Two more quick thoughts,

Everything Jeff mentions is spot on, there is a reason my DIT station is a 2008 MacPro. If you absolutely need internal storage it's a bit easier with the 2008. There is a picture in an older thread of an optical bay mod here:

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?p=549777#post549777

I have a raid in my 2009 tower using sleds like Jeff referred to from these guys:

http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_id=189

But I gotta say, I'd recommend going outboard if you can.

I've been meaning to put together a post on building a low cost high speed raid, but I've been slammed lately.

PM me if that's of interest.

Cheers,

Steve
 
MacPro tower with 4 bays
your installing a 2 tb drive in each and want to raid them all together?

Dumb question I know but I want to make sure i understand that correctly.
 
Evin Grant said:
Yep, 2008. Cool, thanks guys. Where can I get the ipass adaper cabel?
Click to expand...

You may not need an adapter. Which RAID controller are you thinking of going with?
 
Whats the speed difference between OS raid 0 +1 and Hardware Raid 5? I dont need the space but would like some faster IO.
 
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OK! RAID is installed, initialized and posting better numbers than I had expected...
CylonRAIDer.jpg


Specs:
Early 2008 Macpro 3.0ghz 8 core
ATTO R348 Raid Card
4x Hitachi Deskstar 2TB drives
MaxConnect SAS/SATA Link from Maxupgrades.com
Hitachi Deskstar 1TB system drive in second optical bay plugged directly into the mother board.

It took about two hours to install all the hardware and almost 6 to initialize the RAID, but I now have 6TB of useable, protected storage, running at 350+MB/s internally.
I can add another 8tb(6tb useable) in an outboard SAS case if needed too.
 
What drives would be reccomended for a 2006 Mac Pro to be used esentially as a buffer between offload and storage/backup.

I.E:

CF Card --> 2006 Mac Pro (Internal RAID) --> Mac Pro with External Raid and Tape.

Looking at around 4tb internal, could cope with less for more speed.
 
What is the better option for a raid 0 or 5 in the 4bays of a macpro2008
4x 4tb wd (raid edition) in the sata or sas version?
 
If you are looking for maximum speed and maximum space (at the expense of fault tolerance): raid-0

If you want fault tolerance and maximum speed (at the expense of space): raid-10

If you are looking for fault tolerance and maximum space (at the expense of speed): raid-5

I don't think that the large SAS drives have better performance than esata. I may be wrong
 
Wow, zombie thread...

If we're talking about a 2008 Mac Pro 3,1... The best RAID option is either an ATTO or ARECA RAID card. They're both Mac-bootable and you can connect an internal mini-SAS connector on the card to the mini-SAS "i-Pass" connector on the logic board. The ATTO R644 is a good card for this. Gives you an internal 4-channel mini-SAS connector and one external so you can connect eSATA drives or an LTO tape drive. One thing to note, the '08 Mac Pro is PCIe v2.0 for the two X16 slots and only PCIe v1.2 for the two X4 slots. You won't be able to use the full bandwidth potential of the newer 6Gbps ATTO or Areca cards if you put them in the v1 X4 slots, however that slot is still plenty fast enough for any 4-drive RAID you're going to configure.

If you just want to use RAID-0 for performance, also a recommended configuration, just do the setup via Disk Utility.

I like running a RAID in the 4 bays and using the lower optical drive to hold my OS / apps drive. OWC, Crucial and a few others make some excellent 3Gbps SSDs that are very reasonably priced and work great here. Give about 200MB/s reads, 120MB/s writes.

RAID-5 on a good host controller will be faster than RAID 1+0 (10) as you gain a little more bandwidth from the additional drives in the mix. RAID 10 is making two striped RAID-0 pairs and then mirroring them in case they fail. In my experience this isn't any more reliable than a properly managed and monitored RAID-5 and is nowhere near as efficient for speed and capacity.

SAS drives are usually more expensive and don't offer anything more than what the "enterprise" class or "RAID optimized" drives with eSATA interface already offer. You are usually stuck with the SAS interface if you want HDDs with 10K or 15K rpm spindles. Sometimes the SAS models have larger onboard caches.


Don't spend too much money on upgrading an '08 Mac Pro... Remember, they're 5 years old next month. Just sayin'
 
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If you're talking a 2009 or 2010 (current) Mac Pro, the setup is totally different. There is no way to connect another host to the bays in the system via the Logic board. Best bet is to modify the drive sleds so you can connect independent SAS/SATA connectors to a third-party RAID card. Or use RAID 0/1 that is natively supported. As for a new Mac Pro that may arrive this year, who knows what it will offer.

I do NOT recommend using the Apple RAID card. To put it bluntly, it's crap.

For an '09 to current Mac Pro, I recommend running the 4 internal bays in RAID-0 for performance. For larger, better storage, go with an external RAID.
 
so i try to keep the upgrade simple and wait for the new macpros '13/14... in a mac Basic setup with 4drives is it better to make a raid 5 with 3disks for Media and bay #4 is systemdrive only
or a raid 5 or 0/1 "native" with all 4 drives (for Media and system)
 
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