Thunderbolt to PCI or "old" MacPro?

[martinnoweck]

Hi everybody,

I have been using a HIGHPOINT mini-SAS card in my macpro (2008) with an external raid enclosure (8x1TB) till a few months ago, I bought a second external RAID enclosure and because I put 3TB disks in the new enclosure I had to kick the highpoint card out and put an ARECA card instead. In the meantime I also had to upgrade to mountain lion because of the new avid mc software.

I finished several projects on this new setup and now I would like to look at same older projects and the old enclosure. When I connect the old enclosure to the ARECA card the drives are not recognized at all, not even in the disk utitility.

For a one time recovery I might help to put the old highpoint card back in (or is there something i am missing?), but I was thinking now about getting some Thunderbolt PCI extension box and connect the highpoint card to an imac 2011 ... another option would be to setup a second mac pro with the highpoint card to access the data.

Any thoughts? Do's and don'ts?

Best wishes and kind regards,
Martin

 

[Ernesto Lomeli]

Every brand has a different type of raid tree.
You will need to plug in the old card

 

[martinnoweck]

thanks ernesto - do you think the old card in a new mac would work? (i would like to avoid to de-assemble the macpro at the moment ...)
best wishes and kind regards,
martin

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The card will work in the new Mac Pro... Drivers may be a different story, if they have not kept up to date with the latest OSX releases. You can always put an older version of OSX on an external drive and boot from that to install RAID drivers there and access the data if need be. It's a hassle, but stuff like that happens sometimes.

If everything is as you left it, the drive volume should plug right in and run. Only gotcha that I see coming might be if you need to reconfigure the RAID controller and the RAID array is not recognized. Not sure how you had it set up. We're making the assumption that it was a RAID setup created via the old controller. If the old host was just a SAS controller and you created the RAID volume via Disk Utility (RAID-0, 1 or 1+0), then it shouldn't be a big deal and the system should see it just fine once the controller is installed and operational. Next big issue to worry about is if there's any drive or hardware failures due to the unit sitting around. Also an unfortunate thing that seems to happen now and then with hard drives....

 

[martinnoweck]

Thanks Jeff - words of wisdom, as always ;-)

So would you try to get another macpro and install the old card or put the old card in a thunderbolt-to-pci-box
- for example like this one: http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpressse.html
- and try to go the imac 2011 route?

best wishes and kind regards,
martin

 

[martinnoweck]

just to follow up: i bought an used mac pro and installed the old card, all the data is online again.
thanks for all of your help - best wishes and kind regards, martin