CalDigit's RAID Card or Highpoint's RocketRaid 4322

Question

hi Everyone,
Are we having fun now or what eh? Congrats to Apple on it's Nehalem MacPro release! While a test of our patience, the wait was a fine process full of joyous anticipation!
I'll be placing my order shortly, and have decided that the 8-core 2.93ghz with Radeon's 4870 is the one for me. My primary softwares, 3D CAD (Vectorworks) and a rendering program (Artlantis) that I use for making concept presentations, are processor intensive. Moving up from my long serving PowerMac G5 is going to be quite the thrill, but I need some help please. It's about hard drive controller cards...
Six months ago, after doing my due diligence in the RAID research department, the CalDigit RAID Card was the front runner. Now, having read recent reviews, it looks as though I should purchase Highpoint's RocketRaid 4322 card. Price-wise, the Caldigit's $100 less expensive plus there's a $100 rebate deal on 'til the end of April ( http://www.caldigit.com/news/CalDigitVRShippingPR.pdf ) making it actually $200 less than the 4322.
Not that money's no object, (far from it actually!) but, when it comes to this kind of decision, I don't let price hold too much weight. Quality pays and, in this case, what I want to purchase is the best hard drive controller card for my purposes and for this machine,
so...
Which card should I buy? Speed and stability/dependability are the primary goals.
Setup-wise, my plan, at this point, is to run WD Velociraptor 150GB drives in the first two bays. These two drives would be set on RAID 0. On this set, I will install the OS, all my applications, and a few primary data files. In the third and fourth drive bays, I will be installing two Velociraptor 300GB drives also set up as a two-drive RAID 0 set. On this set, I will keep all of my data files.
I think this will be a good way to go. I have three external drives that I use for backup and I occasionally burn discs of my data files (which I'll happily be able to do onto Blu-ray discs using the second optical drive bay's soon to be installed Blu-ray RW drive. Yummy!). Thanks to all the backup, and having an eDrive, I comfortable having everything on RAID 0. Running this G5 on a similar configuration has been fantastic. No problems and great, great speed, especially for this, a nearing five-year-old computer.
I'd appreciate everyone's thoughts here. Which RAID card will you buy or have you bought?
Oh, and just what's the difference between Highpoint's 4322 and their 4320? Reading through the specs at the Highpoint website was entirely unhelpful!
I look forward to hearing from you.
thanks in advance,
yours,
JimQ,
Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada

Answer 1

Maybe this is why Highpoint's two top cards are getting more light on them?
Hi,
From my view, using the Mac Pro internal bays with any 3rd party RAID card is a disaster waiting to happen. Anytime Apple makes a change in the hardware or the OS it can easily cause the card to no longer be able to be installed or work properly. In addition, it is possible that some System updates may not like to be installed on RAID boot volumes and I bet the new Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X will break most current 3rd party RAID drivers.
When the boot system is used with an internal 3rd party RAID driver the possibility of a problem occurring when integrating a Mac OS X update rises exponentially. Having the internal Mac Pro drive bays connected to the motherboard gives the user a fighting chance
The reason I was never excited about the CalDigit RAID card is that it uses a slow, entry level, Intel RAID processor. Even with 16 hard disks connected the card is limited to less than 500MB/sec. In addition, it does not support SAS. The slow processor keeps the performance down even though the HDs can provide much higher performance. A 16 channel card with a slow processor is like a sports car with a 4 cylinder 70 horse power engine. It just doesn't make sense to me.
In contrast, the HighPoint RR 4322 includes the high powered Intel IOP 348 1.2GHz (1200MHz) processor with embedded SAS functionality. This card provides two mini-SAS ports (8-channels) that can provide almost twice the performance with eight hard disks in RAID 0. Using RAID 0, AMUG recorded 801MB/sec write and 748MB/sec read performance with the RR 4322. With a RAID 5 configuration 665MB/sec. performance was recorded. With RAID 6, 580MB/sec. was available. The HighPoint RR 4322 provides amazing performance and SAS compatibility. If performance is important, there is no contest between these two cards.
You can read more on the RR 4322 here:
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/highpoint/4322/
The RR 4322 also supports SAS expanders. This allows the HighPoint card to support up to 128 disks with the use of SAS expanders. AMUG tested the Enhance RS16 JS SAS expander enclosure with the RR 4322 and was able to achieve amazing performance with 16 hard disks. Even RAID 6 provided performance as high as 746MB/sec. write and 894MB/sec. read.
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/enhance/rs16js/
Using an external RAID with the RR 4322 provides great performance when needed and the ability to turn the RAID off when not required. Being able to turn off the RAID when not needed saves energy and provides for longer RAID disk life.
If you do find a system conflict with a Mac OS X update it is much easier to boot up from that backup disk that was created before the update than if the RAID is the internal boot disk
The HighPoint RR 4320 is the internal version of the RR 4322. While it is a great deal at newegg for $329, I would always prefer the external version given a choice. Especially since it sounds like Apple may have altered the internal Mac Pro SATA bay connections.
Have fun!