'09 Mac Pro 8 Core 2.93ghz with Raid Card

Last year Apple swapped an '08 to '09 machine to solve a raid-battery issue in the original raid card of the '08 machine. Battery would fail to recondition after about the second attempt. It took a year of calling Apple and finally they came through supplementing version 1 raid card with version 2 and a new machine.
The error was noted in the RAID utility '08 machine as (Battery Failed(0x0#=18)).
As it happens, I don't use RAID but needed the card at first purchase to run fast SCSI drives for music production within the machine as I transport the machine to various venues and they had to be contained within for my applications. When I purchased the machine I also purchased the SCSI drive. It was about a 9K investment with ram. I always buy Apple Care fortunately.
Now, I have this '09 machine which yesterday exhibited the same raid card battery conditioning failure on about the second or third reconditioning attempt so I called Apple today and they are sending a replacement battery.
The reason I post this here is that this error described above is exactly what happened on the '08 machine and it's raid card. Apple's first attempt to repair starts with the battery, then replacement of the entire raid card if that does not work, then finally they do whatever is required to solve the problem. All this is good but it takes allot of my time and I need the machine to function now.
Please note, If I ran the machine less the raid card and say 4 WD raptor drives I would have none of these issues and similar speed per drive internally. This is exactly what I asked for back on the original machine. I just wanted to be done with attempting a raid/mac machine. The machine upgrade was fine but I hope were not looking at another year to sort all this out again.
I wondered if anyone else out these purchase a Mac Pro with this configuration and has had similar experiences they might share?
I really don't want another year to go by before it's rectified although with this new RAID version 2 possibly I'm ok. Any advance sharing of info would be greatly appreciated as I wait for the battery replacement coming in a few days in attempts to fix the problem. Unfortunately, this could be a temporary fix allowing only a few months of operation prior to another failure, we'll see. This machine is a mission critical one used every day for production.
Thanks for reading this post.
GB

I have almost never read anything good about Apple Pro RAID, and try to steer people away ever since 2007 when it came out...
Still have a closet full of ATTO and Adaptec SCSI but times have changed.
WD is even coming out with 600GB 10K VelociRaptor for $299.
And there seems to be a new rash of RAID and battery questions popping up again.
Audio and music use to mean you needed Fibre and SCSI and the lowest latency, probably even now. But Apple internal RAID?
Any reason why can't be external? Maybe see about replacing with Apple FC or 3rd party?

Similar Messages

Using a Mac Pro w / Apple Internal Hardware RAID Card?

Anyone using a Mac Pro with a Apple Hardware RAID Card 2010?
( I have a 12 Core )
Is it worth the $600-700 ?
How much faster than the software RAID 0?
I see Hamm's RAID tips chart .. but it doesn't include such options .. plus it is based on a PC system.
Any tips would be great ..
I find many areas where the application is slow / unresponsive .. and I'm not sure where the bottleneck is ... Maybe the hardware RAID will solve it?
I'm really am impressed with CS5 .. it would be even better with some adjustments .. but I am absolutely disappointed with sluggish performance on my top-of-the-line Mac Pro 12 Core.
This is not what I expected for a $8,000 machine.
Some users says that the port of CS5 for the Mac has taken a back seat to the Windows version at Adobe.
I can't imagine that Adobe would not put 100% effort into Mac products.
Go Team!!!

I have a 2009 Mac Pro 3.33GHz Quad core w/ Apple RAID card, 16GB RAM from OWC, and Apple's Radeon HD 5870 GPU.
I have RAID 0 set across 3x1TB drives internally, and the standard 640GB drive for OSX and all program files. I set all video assets, renders, previews and such on the 3TB RAID.
This seems to work wonderfully. I built this system specifically to edit a feature film shot on P2 DVCProHD, and I've been impressed with how it handles it. This was all built prior to CS5, which took me by surprise. Had I known nVidia would become such a problem for Apple, I would have built a PC, but that's another story.
I just started a new project in CS5 on the same system, this time using H.264 video from my Nikon D7000, and so far, it seems to play just as nicely, despite not having hardware acceleration via CUDA technology. Yellow bars on top, even. I haven't had any problems with clips taking a long time to populate on the timeline or any of that, so perhaps the RAID card helps there.
All this aside, I've already decided to upgrade my RAID for another reason. Right now, my backup is performed via an eSATA-connected external drive through a PCI eSATA card. After every edit session, I dump everything on the RAID onto the external drive, and it goes much faster than the old FW800 transfer used to. I'm about to replace my Apple RAID card with an Areca card and set up a 4-bay RAID 3 via an SAS connection. This will allow for excellent data throughput while offering more security than my current RAID 0 / manual backup system, and free up the internal drives for backups, exports and render files.
I believe in hardware RAID, but I'm not as knowledgeable as Harm and others are about it. I had my Mac built to order with the Apple RAID card, so I have no experience using Premiere with a software RAID. Due to my smooth experience using it, I think it was worth it, but plenty of people say the Apple RAID card is rubbish, and to go with Areca or Atto cards. I didn't know about them until after I built my system, and even though it will cost a couple thousand to upgrade my RAID from this point, I expect to have an even better system than I already have.
I hope this helps, and feel free to ask any questions I didn't address.

Mac Pro 3,1 (early 2008) RAID card hangs at startup

Hello,
I have a Mac Pro 2.8Ghz Quad Core (early 2008) with 10GB RAM and 512MB VRAM.
I have noticed that the Mac Pro RAID card hangs at startup for RAID volumes.
It seems to start okay with a single boot drive (have used both WD Raptor 150GB 10K and Seagate 'factory' 320GB 7200rpm as boot drives...)
But the RAID 0 array using two factory 1TB WD 7200rpm is what seems to hang at startup. I have run Disk Warrior, Disk Utility and RAID Utility and found no major errors...
Any suggestions? Have already replaced the RAID Card battery with OEM part.
Thanks!

Say good-bye to the Apple Pro RAID card. It started its life as a $999 card to support SAS/SCSI and/or RAID5.
Then the problems with 2.5TB drives, battery, and does it really do something and add to your system.
I would use SoftRAID and create a 3-drive mirror of 2TB drives instead.
And an SSD for the system.
Seems like those are some very old drives.
I have a lot of the 150GB 10K VR drives, and some 300GB along with older 74GB and a couple of the Raptor series. Loud and while solid I would use for spare boot drives, clone only.
Backup your data, pull the RAID card, and restore to the drives. And clone the system onto a 250GB $109 SSD. $139 buys a 400MB/sec writes and 800MB/sec reads Samsung PCIe-SSD XP941. None of my SCSI 15K drives would come close.

Is MAC Pro (late 2013) compatible with Intel E5 or E7 Series 10 core CPU

Is MAC Pro (late 2013) compatible with Intel E5 or E7 series 10 core CPU?

http://macperformanceguide.com/MacPro2013-CPU-upgrade.html
Someone did some testing and these Xeon processors scale differently, turbo-boost means it can put a core to sleep when it isn't needed and give more to the cores that are.
But, the number of apps that do use more than 8-core are in short supply.
Then there is the contention between cooling and whether the cpu or the twin GPUs get preference, OS X won't allow both to ask for full 100%.
We assume you know all there is about cpu scaling and usage and just need to see which ones are on Intel's list that are pin compatible and have the right thermal requirements and such.
Fall is always IDF and v3 of the E5
https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/topic/531053
http://ark.intel.com/products/series/81065/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2600-v3-Produ ct-Family#@All

Mac PRo with raid card shipped with drive not suitable for raid?

Hi all,
I ordered a Mac Pro with raid card and a 1TB hard drive. The drive which came in the computer was WDC WD1001FALS which is not a hard drive rated for raid usage. On Western Digital's site they suggest using WD1002FBYS.
Is the model WD1001FALS the correct drive which Apple ships although one ordered the raid card?

The WD 640GB Blue, and WD 1TB Black are the only drive options for the mac pro; that's what you choose.
The RE3 (or FBYS) is not an option sold through apple. Buying the raid card, is not going to change the drive.
On whether to use the RE3 over the Blacks, it depends on how you will be using it. From what I've heard, the Blacks are enterprise drives themselves; basically with just a less robust firmware (no TLER). If you will have the drives on 24/7 in a raid 5, then yes, RE3 will probably be better. If not, I think the black will suffice; note the blacks are GREAT drives by themselves anyway.
The apple raid card can connect to both SATA and SAS drives internally, however most times people buying the raid card want to use it for SAS drives. There are a lot more cheaper and possibly a lot more stable options then apple's raid card if you are looking to use SATA drives.
Check amug:
http://www.amug.org/
A common problem with the apple raid card is the battery:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MA849Z/B?mco=NDc1ODczNw
Lastly about enterprise drives, truthfully I don't see the difference really. I have enterprise drives in a 8-drive raid5 config running 24/7 as a server. 2 drives died on me after about 4 months. To top it off, they died within 10 min of each other, crushing the raid to pieces. Granted they were Seagate ES.2's, it's understandable
The boot drive of the server is a stock desktop WD drive and running 24/7. It's been running for almost 4 years straight.

Mac Pro (First Generation) problem with 1TB Seagate Barracuda

Hi Macianer,
I have a first generation Mac Pro which was sold with max. 750GB Hard drives for each bay. At this time I am grabbing for straws and maybe someone has any info on this problem.
I purchased 4 x 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard drives ( Model: ST31000340AS / Firmware: SD15 ), did a regular format after I purchased them ( GUID Partition Table, Journaled HFS+ File System). I am using 2 of them internally (they get quite hot and i didn't want to put all 4 of them in there) and two of them externally (backup purposes). The other two internal bays are covered by 2x 500GB Barracuda drives.
I put all four 1 TB hard drived through a 1 week stress test to make sure I am not dealing with bad apples. So far this practice served me well.
Now 2 weeks later one completely crashed (internal boot drive). It sounded to spin up alright but was not accessible at all. I went to BestBuy and GeekSquad said this drive is crashed and I returned it.
Since I had a backup I didn't worry too much. I put the back up hard drive in as the new boot drive (since it was a SuperDuper duplicat) it worked like a charm. Now the second hard drive starts temporarily freezing the system for 2-4 minutes and seems to get stuck showing the great colored ball of doom. After the freeze it continues to operate normal again and I am able to continue my work.
I ran the Disk Utility and I got the following message:
INVALID KEY LENGTH
VOLUME CHECK FAILED.
ERROR: FILESYSTEM VERIFY OR REPAIR FAILED.
It just seems weird, I never had problems with hard drives and now I get these problems with 3-4 week old hard drives.
I was in a chat with seagate support. First question to trouble shoot: Do you have access to a PC. My answer was no since Microsoft Vista I donated all of them to the Salvation Army. He asked if I formatted the hard drives low level and MBR with HFS+. I said since I do not have access to PC nor do I plan on using my hard drives for PC I formatted it regular with GUID and HFS+. I asked if there is any history of these drives that would help explain my experience. I was hoping for a recall or something of that sort or something that a firmware upgrade would remedy.
I guess my question is, is the first generation Mac Pro, even though it seems to format and run them fine, not able to handle 1TB hard drives on a daily basis. Or am I dealing with hard drive problems? The Seagate guy didn't seem to be of any help.
Any help is appreciated or even pointers that would help me in finding the problem.
Cheers,
PixelGrinch
Message was edited by: PixelGrinch

Excellent questions, I too am looking at SSD.
Some things I know about SSD:
1. Intel recently released new firmware for their SSD drives to improve long term performance including Trim/Garbage collection.
2. SSD drives can be setup as SLC or MLC - SLC is faster read 2X, write 4X over MLC, however SLC is smaller capacity. SLC also has a longer life span.
3. Intel plans to have an 320GB X25-M (MLC) and a 128GB X25-E (SLC) out soon.
OSX does not fully support Trim and I'm not aware of any 3rd party software for OSX that helps in the garbage collection area. Diskeeper 2010 for Windows 7 provides full support for all variants of SSD, but nothing on the Mac side.
I'm probably going to wait for 2010 to see what comes out, SSD appears to be good news, but it still also seems to have issues. Given the cost of these drivers and the frequent firmware updates, a wait and see is my choice.
I've thought about going with a SAS RAID controller and 15K RAID drivers, but the cost/performance ratio comes out about the same and the 15K drives are noisey and power hungry but they're a "known" entity.
Rob

Where can i buy mac pro core 12 64GB (8x8GB) memory?

64GB (8x8GB)
for the mac pro core 12 memory

Yes. I've bought a lot of stuff from them over the years. And in fact when I got my mac pro I bought my ram from them too. They specifically cater to mac needs. They have a fairly liberal return policy. For example, I bought a eSATA card which turned out to not work the way I expected with my external enclosure (also bought from OWC). I returned it for another make of card with no problems. Reading these and other mac forums you will see a lot of recommendations for OWC.
And yes, I don't know why the url is macsales.com either. But it should be obvious from that choice of url they really do cater to mac ('er sales).

2008 mac pro will not boot with HD 5770 installed.

Does anyone have suggestions for this. When I say it will not boot, I mean it will not respond at all to the power button if the card is installed (or at least if the power cord for the card is plugged into the motherboard. This is a mac pro version 3,1 with 8 cores 2.8 xeon, 22GB ram, running 10.6.8. Boots fine with xt2600 but will not boot if the 5770 power cord is plugged in. THis is an apple specific card from B and H. Perhaps I received a bad card. I have tried with and without the xt2600 installed and have tried in slots 1 and 2. I do not have any other PCI cards installed. Iknow this is not an "officially supported card" but it seems to work for everyone else.

Sounds like the ATI 5770 issue to me.
And 5770 worked on 1000s and 1000s of Mac Pro all models, like mine a 1,1 (there is even a thread of 160+ posts)
Where did you buy the cable and card, if from Apple and it is recent, exchange.
You are saying you never got to work...

I have the current Mac Pro the entry level with the default specification and i feel some slow performance when applying after effects on my videos using final cut pro and also rendering a video takes long time ? what upgrades do you guys suggest?

i have the current Mac Pro the entry level with the default configuration and i feel lack of performance when applying after effects on my videos using final cut pro and also rendering a video takes long time ? what upgrades do you guys suggest i could do on my Mac Pro ?

256GB SSD it shipped with will run low and one of the things to watch.
Default memory is 12GB also something to think about.
D500 and FCP-X 10.1+
http://macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html#MacPro2013Performance
Five models of 2013 Mac Pro running Resolve, FCPX, After Effects, Photoshop, and Aperture

Can I mirror my 3rd generation iPad on my Mac mini core 2 duo with 10.6?

Can I mirror my 3rd generation iPad on my Mac mini core 2 duo with 10.6?

You would need OS 10.8.x for mirroring. But no you can mirror your iPad to your mac mini See here for more information http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5404

Can a shell for mac pro 13" be used with a mac pro Retina ?

Can a shell for mac pro 13" be used with a mac pro Retina ?
Thank you.

No.
The entire enclosure is tuned for both external jack placement, EMI-RFI radiation, airflow, and for cooling. You need exactly the correct shell and fans for the electronics you wish to install in it.

I have an early 2008 Mac Pro, 8 gb ram with a Dell 27" display and a 42" LG TV. I am thinking about upgrading the stock ATI Radeon 2600 graphics card for better resolution, preferring 2 dvi outputs. Does anyone have any suggestions on the best card?

I have an early 2008 Mac Pro, 8 gb ram with a Dell 27” display and a 42” LG TV. I am thinking about upgrading the stock ATI Radeon 2600 graphics card for better resolution, preferring 2 dvi outputs or 1 dvi and 1 vga vs 1 dvi and a mini. I don't do a lot of Final Cut Pro, gaming, etc. I am interested in best value for the graphics card.
Does anyone have any suggestions on the best graphics card for these larger displays for the best value?
Thanks,
Kevin

I recommend you install nothing older than the Apple-firware 5770, about US$250.
RE: Mac Pro Replacement Graphics cards
1) Apple brand cards,
2) "sold in the Apple store" cards, and
3) "Mac Edition" cards ...
... show all the screens, including Boot up screens, Safe Mode, Installer, Recovery, debug screens, and Alt/Option boot screens. At this writing, these choices include:
1) Apple brand cards:
• Apple-firmware 5770, about US$250** works near full speed in every model Mac Pro, Drivers in 10.6.5
• Apple-firmware 5870, about US$450
2) "sold in the Apple store" cards
• NVIDIA Quadro 4000, about US$1200
• NVIDIA Quadro 5000, about US$2500
3) "Mac Edition" cards -- REQUIRE 10.8.3 or later:
• SAPPHIRE HD 7950 3GB GDDR5 MAC Edition, about US$480** Vendor recommends Mac Pro 4,1
• EVGA GTX 680 Mac Edition, about US$600
The cards above require no more than the provided two 6-pin aux power connectors provided in the Mac Pro through 2012 model. Aux cables may not be provided for third-party cards, but are readily available.
If you are Meet ALL of these:
• running 10.8.3 or later AND
• don't care about "no boot screens" etc AND
• can re-wire or otherwise "work out" the power cabling, THEN:
You can use many more cards, even most "PC-only cards"

I have 2007 mac pro i need a new graphic card what kind can i use?

have 2007 mac pro i need a new graphic card what kind can i use?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1345150
http://blog.macsales.com/6856-owc-reveals-which-radeon-video-cards-work-with-200 6-2009-mac-pros

Very slow speeds with Mac Pro talking to a Ubuntu Raid Server

So I have an environment where mainly macs and a couple Windows PCs use a Ubuntu Raid 50 file server. When attempting to access the server the Mac Pros take typically 1 minute to view the file structure and sometimes timeout, the Windows machines take about 1 second. Also this seems to affect copying and deleting which takes much longer from the Mac side. The server is setup simply with a samba mount to allow access.
Any suggestions for how I can attack this issue? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Colin

Nope. The Macs and PCs are on the same subnet and plugged into the same switch, from the wall.

My mac pro won't pair with my magic trackpad.

I'm posting in this forum because I am using a Mac Pro, what we used to call a "tower," and my Magic Trackpad isn't recognized & won't pair. This has been an increasing problem over the past year, and I actually blamed the trackpad and bought a new one -- and of course it doesn't work either. My MacBook Pro (actually two of them) use the same latest version of Mountain Lion and they pair up just fine, never dropping the connection. I'm an old-timer with 25 years on the Mac, and I'm stumped. The support forums here confirm that this is a common problem -- MT not pairing -- and I have tried every suggestion I can find. Booting in safe mode, repairing permissions, trashing the bluetooth prefs file, VRAM and SMC resets, moving computer away from any possible interference, and probably two or three more I can't recall. I don't have any exotic apps installed (there's one that has something to do with Windows that can cause this problem, but I don't have it), nothing on the tower that's not on the two laptops running the same OS X version. For the record, I have a 2x2.8 Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM, all the original Apple installation. OS X is 10.8.4. I've tried three different brands of alkaline batteries. For a time the problem was intermittent (the dreaded "dropped connection") but now it doesn't pair up at all, i.e. neither of my two trackpads pair up. I've let the "searching" function run for as long as 30 minutes, including some restarts of the trackpad...you get the picture. Although this has been addressed in other places in support, I am posting here because so far I don't have a solution. Any ideas? I really appreciate the forum, have been here a long time, and hope that someone has that next good idea that's going to help me. Thanks in advance!

I had the same problem as you with Bluetooth stuff. It was suggested to me that I buy an external BT dongle
as the bluetooth reception in the stock Mac Pro was spotty at best.I did so- iogear 421 (the 521 is supported but ONLY in Mountain Lion, so I was told) and bluetooth works just fine. Of course it might be that the cables for your Bluetooth/Airport card in your Mac Pro could have been installed incorrectly (just google bluetooth in Mac Pro help) but...if they have been, then the dongle might be your best bet, or some kind of external antenna
(the G5 had one, as you may know, but we don't......)
I see by your posting you have tried every suggestion you possibly could, and it's not software related
and it's not a simple one-shot-done fix...
that's the best I have for now. I think I paid about $25 for the dongle and it was easy as pie to install
John B

'09 Mac Pro 8 Core 2.93ghz with Raid Card

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for