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RAID Controller Advice

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zak forrest

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I'm about to purchase an Enhance Technology Ultrastore RS16 JS 16TB SAS box to hook up to a new Mac Pro.

http://www.enhance-tech.com/products/ultrastor/RS16_JS.html

Could someone please advise what the best RAID controller card to get for this is? I will most likely expand and get another RS16 JS box to expand onto this soon as well. Just using this box for REDCODE, so speed isn't that big of a factor here.
 
So I'm thinking to put in my Mac Pro additional to the RedRocket a RAID Card and make a internal RAID 5. So that I have a stand alone machine which has enough bandwidth to work in realtime. Would be great to take the machine also away, so for that an external RAID is not so fine. I looked to the caldigit card which looks nice.... Is it possible to have a extra drive as bootdrive in it then? So the 4 standard SATA drives in RAID plus an additional for system? Or is it possible to install one RAID5 only with 3 disks? If you plug in a RAID Card in the Mac Pro, how is the connection to drives made? via the internal bus, because they fit direct in ? Probably the empty slot for the second optical drive could be used ?

thx for infos

rainer
 
Last edited:
raid 5/6

raid 5/6

raid 5 can be at least 3 HDDs. If one fails, the data is safe. The array can be built from as many HDDs as you want, just: one dead HDD is no prob, two mean corrupted data.

raid 6 I believe at least 4 HDDs. If up to 2 fail, data still safe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_6
 
yeah I know, so the safest version would be a RAID 6 with 4 disks, so you get the volume of 2 disks.... I think on the seagate sata disks with 1TB with 115MB/s read write. I have one already in use and the AJA benchmark test shows 105 MB/s sustained read write.... so anybody has a suggestion to the RAID card and how it is installed correctly ? ATTO or caldigit? where can i find the cables to the internal drives to connect them to the raid card? or any other basic suggestions ?

thx
rainer
 
With a 4 disk array, I would do RAID-5 and keep a spare drive on hand. Have a good backup procedure in place.

Rainer, which Mac Pro do you have? With the latest 2009 Nehalem mac pro, there is no direct access to the internal drive connectors. You need to re-mount the drives in their caddies -- flip them around for starters, some drives work without modding the caddies to allow proper clearance, some do not. Then you run cabling from the internal connectors on the desired RAID card to the drives.

On previous Mac Pro models, there is an "ipass" cable that connects to the 4 internal drive bays. It's really just a mini-SAS SFF-8087 connector that fans out to 4 single-channel SAS/SATA connectors. You can disconnect this cable from the logic board and connect it directly to the CalDigit RAID card. The CalDigit card is nice, I have it installed in a 2008 Mac Pro. You can flip a jumper on the card and connect a short mini-SAS cable from a second connector on the card to the logic board and that will reserve the HDD in bay 1 to run off the logic board's SATA controller. So this way you can use that drive for bootcamp.

However, the two problems I have with the CalDigit RAID card are the performance on the top end. The card tops out at about 600MB/s or so. The other problem is the card only works with their own HD-Element external units. If you can live with these two restrictions, then the CalDigit RAID card is the perfect RAID card for the '06 and '08 model Mac Pro systems. The price is very reasonable. And their HD-Element 4-drive enclosures are a hardware RAID solution. I lost a 1.5TB HDD in mine and I swapped out the drive and the RAID cabinet rebuilt the RAID-5 volume in about 90 minutes or so. The CalDigit RAID card works in the '09 Mac Pro, but you will run into the restrictions of connecting to the internal drives. You can buy a 3rd-party ipass cable, and flip the drives around...

For the '09 Mac Pro or if you want a more robust solution than the CalDigit in the other Mac Pro systems, I recommend the HighPoint and ATTO cards. My preference is ATTO. Top notch support. CalDigit has great support too.
 
Jeff thanks a lot for your advice. I have a 2008 model. So what do you think about to put one drive in the empty place below the optical drive and connecting that to the mainboard, and the ilink cable with all the 4 drives to the raid card? It would be great to get 4 drives in raid 5.
the only thing is the number of pci slots.... so i have the graphic card in, then there should be a redrocket in, so the 16x slots are used and as i see the raid cards need at least 8x, but in the mac pro are only 4x left.... how to handle that ?
So and what do you think about areca cards ?

thx

rainer
 
Well whe I first got our..

Enhance tech 8ML and ATTO R380

installed ntfs for osx

installed driver for atto in XP SP3. Formatted NTFS in XP

Boot into OSX and was fine.

Didnt run long term test though as was testing for Scratch that we never ended up getting due to job budget.

Si
 
Areca makes good cards, but I'm not as familiar with them as with ATTO, CalDigit and HighPoint.

Obin, for a card that supports RAID-5 in bootcamp mode, I guess I want to clarify what you're asking. If you want a RAID that can be accessed in OSX as well as when you boot into windows, that's not a problem. The ATTO, HighPoint and Areca cards all have OSX, Windows and Linux drivers. The only real catch is the file system you choose. You will need to install NTFS support for OSX or MacOS / HPFS support for Windows in order for any RAID partitions to be usable in both OS's. Not a big deal.

If you want to be able to boot into a Bootcamp OS like windows that resides on the RAID volume, then that's another story. I don't know what to suggest. The Apple systems are funny in how they handle Bootcamp partitions. I don't think the Bootcamp Assistant will let you create a BC partition on a RAID volume. But you could probably create a BC volume and partition on an internal drive and then use disk utility to make an image of that drive that can then be copied onto a partition on the RAID. Maybe that would show up in the boot menu? I haven't tried that. For Bootcamp, I have just been leaving a dedicated 1TB HDD for my Windows install.
 
Thanks, but right now my mac pro has 4 internal drives. 1 is for the OSs and the others for storage. I just need to have them in raid 5 and be able to work from xp, vista and mac os. And i don´t want to spend a lot of money.
 
Mac I will try to put an extra drive in the empty slot below the optical drive. power cord is there but only IDE cable. So one sata cable from the logic board to there would be great and we could use all the internals for raid 5. the highpoint cards are very cheap.....
 
Don't be concerned about the PCIe 8x or 4x. The 8x cards all work just fine in a 4x slot, in fact they will work in a 1x slot. It's just a matter of how many lanes or how much bandwidth you allow the card. That is 250MB/s per lane and for PCI Express 2.0 you can double that to 500MB/s per lane, assuming your card supports PCIe 2.0. For the 2009 model Mac Pro, I recommend getting a PCIe 2.0 card since the slots are all 2.0. Those x4 slots would have a bandwidth ability of 2GB/s. Or more than 2X the bandwidth needed to work with uncompressed 10bit 4K in real-time. And you're not going to get anywhere close to that off of 4 internal HDD's. For the older '08 and '06 Mac Pro models, You won't have the PCIe 2.0 for the two x4 slots, but you will still be fine. In the '06 models, you can configure lane allocations to match your cards somewhat. You can actually leave slot-1 as x16, give slot-2 8x for the RED Rocket, and then allocate the last two slots both as x8. But once again, that's only on the '06 models. The '08 and '09 Mac Pros have their lane assignments hard-wired.

A good card to consider for the Mac Pro that won't break the bank is the HighPoint RocketRAID 4321. It provides 4 internal ports via a mini-SAS connector and 4 external ports by mini-SAS as well. One configuration that comes to mind is to install one or two HDDs into the lower optical bay (two will fit sideways with the proper bracket). Leave two HDDs connected to the logic-board SATA host and the other four connected to the RAID card. That RAID card is a bit on the expensive side, getting close to $700 NewEgg has it in stock. If you don't need external expansion ability at the moment, then and don't need the ability to connect SAS drives, as in SATA only, you can go with the RocketRAID 3510 -- single internal mini-SAS for 4 SATA connections. It's about $330. There are cheaper ones, but you will start to make compromises by going much cheaper.

I still prefer the ATTO cards, but they are going to be a lot more expensive in most cases. Their RAID cards are all fully SAS compliant and that adds to the costs. The R348 is the one to get for internal connectivity, but from discount online vendors it's still in the $800 price range.
 
Rainer Fritz said:
Mac I will try to put an extra drive in the empty slot below the optical drive. power cord is there but only IDE cable. So one sata cable from the logic board to there would be great and we could use all the internals for raid 5. the highpoint cards are very cheap.....
Click to expand...

On the '09 Mac Pros, the optical bays are SATA and cables are already there. Most '08 and earlier Mac Pros are as you describe. However, some late '08 Mac Pros started shipping with SATA optical drives too and had the cabling for the two bays already run to the ODD SATA header on the logic board. So it's worth a look to see what's already there.
 
Rainer Fritz said:
Mac I will try to put an extra drive in the empty slot below the optical drive. power cord is there but only IDE cable. So one sata cable from the logic board to there would be great and we could use all the internals for raid 5. the highpoint cards are very cheap.....
Click to expand...

Good idea! I´ll do that. Allthough i guess i´ll need to find the same exact HDD model as the other ones.

My mac pro is from 2008 btw.

Jeff that $330 card sounds great. I won´t need external raids for the moment.

But can i build a raid 5 with 4 discs?
 
RAID 5 with 4 drives is working fine so far... one for safety, 3 operational..... I need to get a look for proper cabling.....

Jeff, could I add Sata drives to a SAS port of the card ? Adapter cables ??? Because the 3510 seems to be a SAS card....

thx
rainer
 
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