Mac RAID card - expanding volume

Hello - I have a Mac Pro with the Apple RAID card and a three disks RAID-0 (striped) volume (which is also the boot volume).
Can I increase the volume capacity adding a disk to the volume, without having to format the raid set and start from a backup? In other words, can the raid card increase the volume capacity dinamically (and is there a guide for this?)
thanks

No. If you think of your RAID Array as three people playing cards, each gets dealt a card in turn. That is what happens with the RAID Array, data is written to each disk in turn.
If you add another player to the game, in order to be fair you must deal again. That is exactly what happens with the RAID Array, you must reformat and start over again.
Allan
Message was edited by: Allan Eckert

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Apple Raid Card - Rename Volume

The lion install for 10.7.2 apparently fixes the creation of the recover partititon on raid volumes.
However, it seems to corrupt the name of the volume in my case and I cannot figure out the terminal command to rename the volume back to it's original name of SYSTEM from changed name it creates on install.I'd appreciate if this is expected behavior when it creates multiple partitions on a hardware raid or if this is an error/fault in the way lion alters the disk in anyones experience.
Any help with the terminal syntax (if it applies) would be greatly appreciated

Maybe you need to do a full surface scan for bad or weak failing sectors.
Next time it drops out (or whenever you decide to remove it manually).
Use Disk Utility to Initialize with Write Zeroes option. This takes several hours.
If it completes without any error messages at all, it should then be good to use.
If Bad Blocks are found, they will generally be spared out by this process, and the drive can be good to use for a while, but is likely to fail within 6 months. You should consider moving it to light-duty or occasional use, such as backups.
Sometimes the Initialization will fail. If the drive is still under warranty, return it to the manufacturer for a refund/replacement. Original Apple drives have a one-year warranty, same as your Mac. Manufacturer warranties are often (but not always) 3 years or more.

Apple Raid Card, multiple drives and volumes

Hallo,
my xserve (early-2008) has an Apple Raid Card and two 300GB SAS-drives installed (mirroring).
Is it possible to install a third disk (300GB SAS) and to use it as a separate Volume ?
Disk 1 (300GB SAS) - Apple Raid Card mirroring: Volume 1 (300GB)
Disk 2 (300GB SAS) - Apple Raid Card mirroring: Volume 1 (300GB)
Disk 3 (300GB SAS) - Volume 2 (300GB)
How do I have to set this up using Apple Raid Utility ?
Thanks for your help !

Is it possible to install a third disk (300GB SAS) and to use it as a separate Volume ?
Yes. Of course.
How do I have to set this up using Apple Raid Utility ?
No. A third drive should just appear on the desktop. You only need RAID utility if you want to add that drive to an array, which doesn't sound like the case here.

MacPro Raid Card w/ SAS Drives is battery required?

We have a MacPro (early 2008) dual 2.8 Quad with Mac Raid Card and 4 300g SAS drives. The battery became an issue early on it was always showing low on start-ups. Now it shows failed. I am now running system with 3 drives striped raid 0. Is the battery required to be replaced? I like this system for the speed it gives us on short HD, using my original media as the back-up. I am a little out of my league with the SAS drives so any opperation tips would be a plus! Thanx in advance....

The RAID card allows for the use of SAS drives or for the use of RAID 5 (which requires checksum calculation on writes and for data re-creation after a failure).
The battery assures that the data will be held in the RAID card's RAM until it can be written to the drives, even if a power failure occurs just after the data are written to the card (but before they are re-written to the drives).
Not using that feature? You don't need the battery.
Not using RAID 5 or SAS drives? You don't need the Apple RAID card. Disk Utility can set up Striped or Mirrored RAID sets.

Raid Card Constantly Degrades Volumes - Mac Pro

I just got a new Mac Pro with Raid card. I of course purchased hard drives separately, rather than apples inflated rate. I picked up four 750 GB Samsung F1 Raid (F1R) edition drives from OWC thinking it would work well with my system.
No matter what raid level I choose, within a day or two it says one of drives were removed and then it says replaced within 15 seconds, causing the entire raid set to be degraded. I believe it might just be these drives go into a lower power standby mode and aren't as responsive as the raid card wants them to be....hence it declares them "removed." This means no matter what I have tried I am constantly changing raid levels hoping one will fair better than another and wasting 10+ hours initializing and reinstalling.
Any hints, can I make the raid card less sensitive through firmware update or something? I'm kind of bummed I have these four nice drives and the best option seems to be use them as individual JBOD drives.
Please help.

I had gone through this same process numerous times (though I was hoping for RAID 5). Apple officially says that they don't "support non-apple drives," though you would hope many work anyways. I believe my problem at least is probably due to the firmware on my hard drives not responding in the time frame the apple RAID card expects. So, I doubt your RAID card is faulty (though I greatly wish someone would post a solution to our problems).
After you give up trying to use RAID completely, you can erase all your RAID sets....select only one of the disks to create a set with, select the JBOD (Just a Bundle of Disks) mode. Repeat for all of your hard drives, create an individual volume on each, and install OS X. You will now be set up in a standard 4 separate hard disk mode with no RAID protection. However, you still utilize your RAID card so you get the added benefits of a large disk i/o cache (256 MB I believe) and a battery backup for your write operations. Not what I paid for but at least something that works. Be sure to set at least one of the disks for time machine to use as a backup (so you get something for data protection). Hope this helps, it took me awhile to decide to ditch RAID and think logically to get it working at least.
Please can anyone help solve our problems? Please!

I replaced the battery on my RAID card, when I booted my mac pro up, I get the folder with the question mark. I used a boot USB drive to boot and when I looked in the RAID utility, my RAID 5 volumes were no longer showing, advise.

I replaced the battery on my RAID card, when I booted my mac pro up, I get the folder with the question mark. I used a boot USB drive to boot and when I looked in the RAID utility, my RAID 5 volumes were no longer showing, advise.
Ernest

Not sure if I'm following you. I have 4 hard drives installed on my Mac Pro. I had a RAID 5 configured and functional for about 5 months. My battery died on the RAID card. I replaced the battery, seated the RAID card back in the slot I removed it from. When I booted to the USB drive to look in the RAID utility, I could see the battery is charged but my volumes are not showing.
The drives don't show in disk Utility. I built the RAID with the RAID Utility and they did show there. I have a early 2008 Mac Pro, Mavricks OS running Mac Server

Apple Raid card fitted - expand command fails

Ladies and Gents,
Terminal and RAID n00b here.
4 x 750Gb drives in a Mac Pro with Raid card fitted.
Created R5 with 3 drives (messed up, expected 1.3Tb R5 - Got 698Gb + 670Gb spare space)..
Just wanted 1.3 Tb R5. Tried expand command from the user guide;
Terminal I/O below - any help please?
no-dns-yet:~ sn$ raidutil list volumeinfo
Volumes Status Raidset Type Size Comments
R3V1 Is Viable RS1 RAID 5 698.45GB Condition: Good
no-dns-yet:~ sn$ sudo raidutil modify volume --expand -n R3V1 -s 670.63GB
Unsupported by this version of the hardware/firmware.
Obliged for assistance please...
GUI screenshot here;
files.me.com/burtonboyz/2i0f74

Oops wrong forum - sorry

Sleep or Shut Down with Mac Pro RAID Card?

I'll be gone for a four-day weekend trip, which is longer than the 72 hours claimed for the Mac Pro RAID Card battery. If I shut down and come back four days later, the battery will presumably be discharged. What will happen when I restart?
Asked another way ... is 72 hours the maximum amount of time that the computer should be shut down or do I simply restart and wait for the battery to recharge and the write caches to be re-enabled?
The FAQ for the Mac Pro RAID Card http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1346 talks around this issue, but doesn't say whether it is a good or bad idea to allow the battery to discharge for "... any length of time." Please review the appended excerpt from the FAQ and advise on whether I should sleep or shut down.
Regards,
iPhoton
Question: Why does RAID Utility show a yellow light and report the status "Write cache disabled"?
Answer: The write cache is disabled automatically so data cannot be written to RAID volumes when the battery charge is not sufficient to back up cached data for 72 hours. This message is normally encountered when a RAID Card is used for the first time, when the battery enters a conditioning cycle once every three months, or when a computer with a RAID Card installed is shut down for any length of time.
If your RAID card's firmware is M-2.0.3.3 or later, or E-1.2.2.4 or later, you can use RAID Utility to force-enable the write cache while the battery conditions itself. Warning: If you enable the write caches before the battery is fully charged, you might lose some data if the power to your computer is interrupted.

Thanks to everyone who replied to my message. I did a proper backup and normal shut down on Wednesday night and restarted on Monday morning. That was over 100 hours later and certainly more than the battery is specified (72 hours).
When I restarted on Monday morning I noticed ... no change! The battery was fully charged according to the RAID Utility, I received no warning messages, there were no new events in the RAID Utility log ... it's as if the extended shutdown never occurred.
So, an extended shutdown appears not to be a problem and I won't worry about it again, not even on my next extended shutdown for three weeks at the end of the year.
Regards,
iPhoton

Mac Pro (2009) RAID Card - Can't create RAID Set

Hi Everyone,
I have a Mac Pro 4,1 (Model 2009) running Mavericks 10.9.2. with the Apple RAID Card installed. I got 4 new SAS Drives (Dell Toshiba MK2001TRKB) which I'm trying to configure into a single RAID5 set.
OS X detects the individual drives and with Disk Utility I can partition and/or format the individual drives. However when I try to create a RAID5 set using RAID Utility, the card won't create the RAID set. Ik keeps on showing the white-blue stripped progress bar. Tried creating a RAID0 or RAID1 with just 2 drives, but the card just doesn't create a RAID set.
Anyone got a clue why this isn't working?
Thanks,
Sander

Manualy erased all 4 the drives and it worked instantly. System is now initializing the volume :-)
Still a bit strange. All 4 the drivers where brand new. I did some further testing and if I select the partion tab and just create a new partition on each drive, it still doesn't work. I have to select the erase option in Disk Utility and just do a simple erase on each drive in order to be able to create the RAIDset.
Anyway, Thanks for the advise; performance even during initializing is pretty fast. I'm curious to see what kind of performance I get aftet the initialization is completed.

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.

2010 Mac Pro with Apple RAID card - "Drive carrier 00:03 removed"

I've got a 2010 Mac Pro with the Apple RAID card and 4 internal identical Seagate ST32000641AS 2TB drives inside.
I've never had a problem with the RAID card (either battery or in operation) except for one thing:
Almost every time I shut the machine down (which I try to do as rarely as possible), it keeps losing Drive 3, the spare.
(See RAID Utility event log snippet below.)
[I wish I could understand why this Apple RAID card keeps losing the spare across power-cycles/reboots, but I digress.]
So I just adopted it as the spare and it spawns the rebuild and many hours later, everything's fine again.
... until the last time I rebooted (Jan. 2nd).
After the usual "I lost the spare" message upon login, it began the rebuild.
But this time, about 11 1/2 hours later the rebuild stopped and RAID Utility reported "Drive carrier 00:03 removed".
Bay 3 is now missing in the Controller view.
I powered off the system last night, and left it off overnight. Today I took all the drives out, blew the dust off and reseated them.
Same thing. Drive 3 is still missing, and now the rebuild task aborted.
The drive bay location shouldn't matter, right? Can I swap the Bay 3 drive with the Bay 4 drive?
I figure one of two things would happen:
(1) It will report Bay 3 as being there but Bay 4 as being missing, same situation as is now. Meaning the problem is in the Bay 3 spare drive.
(2) It will report Bay 3 as being missing (despite a 'good' drive being present) and Bay 4 will be the (unattached) spare, and the RAID set will be unviable. Meaning the problem is with the drive bay itself, not whatever drive is plugged into it.
If "Drive carrier removed" is trying to tell me the disk is bad, why do I not see any log messages about it? I suppose a spare that never gets used could go bad from lack of use, but ... no messages at all?
Hesitant to plunk down $160 on a new spare disk if the present one isn't actually dead ...
% sudo raidutil list raidsetinfo
                                     Total     Avail
Raidsets      Type       Drives       Size      Size Comments
RS1           RAID 5     1,2,4      5.23TB    0.00MB Rebuild: 0% complete
% sudo raidutil list driveinfo
Drives Raidset       Size      Flags
Bay #1 RS1             2.00TB   IsMemberOfRAIDSet:RS1 IsReliable
Bay #2 RS1             2.00TB   IsMemberOfRAIDSet:RS1 IsReliable
Bay #4 RS1             2.00TB   IsMemberOfRAIDSet:RS1 IsReliable
Event log snippet:
Saturday, January 11, 2014 8:15:19 AM PT
Background task aborted: Task=Rebuild,Scope=DRVGRP,Group=RS1
informational
Friday, January 3, 2014 3:50:28 AM PT
Drive carrier 00:03 removed
informational
Thursday, January 2, 2014 4:29:37 PM PT
Marked drive in bay 3 as a global spare
informational
Thursday, January 2, 2014 4:29:28 PM PT
Adopted drive in bay 3
informational
Thursday, January 2, 2014 4:28:34 PM PT
Degraded RAID set RS1 - No spare available for rebuild
critical
Saturday, December 7, 2013 5:35:17 PM PT
Marked drive in bay 3 as a global spare
informational
Saturday, December 7, 2013 5:35:08 PM PT
Adopted drive in bay 3
informational
Saturday, December 7, 2013 5:34:11 PM PT
The "RedundancyScrub" command could not be executed. (Invalid request or invalid parameter in the request.)
warning
Saturday, December 7, 2013 5:34:03 PM PT
Degraded RAID set RS1 - No spare available for rebuild
critical
Friday, December 6, 2013 4:56:47 AM PT
Battery finished conditioning
informational
Thursday, December 5, 2013 9:53:44 PM PT
Battery started scheduled conditioning cycle (write cache disabled)
informational
Friday, September 6, 2013 10:53:11 PM PT
Battery finished conditioning
informational
Friday, September 6, 2013 3:41:33 PM PT
Battery started scheduled conditioning cycle (write cache disabled)
informational
Saturday, June 8, 2013 3:41:35 PM PT
Battery finished conditioning
informational
Saturday, June 8, 2013 8:37:49 AM PT
Battery started scheduled conditioning cycle (write cache disabled)
informational
Thursday, May 30, 2013 4:09:51 PM PT
Marked drive in bay 3 as a global spare
informational
Thursday, May 30, 2013 4:09:42 PM PT
Adopted drive in bay 3
informational
Thursday, May 30, 2013 4:08:59 PM PT
Degraded RAID set RS1 - No spare available for rebuild
critical
Thursday, May 30, 2013 3:32:29 PM PT
Degraded RAID set RS1
warning

Power Pig wrote:
"Hesitant to plunk down $160 on a new spare disk if the present one isn't actually dead ...
% sudo raidutil list raidsetinfo
                                     Total     Avail
Raidsets      Type       Drives       Size      Size Comments
RS1           RAID 5     1,2,4      5.23TB    0.00MB Rebuild: 0% complete
I was talking about this.
This looks like a RAID 5 setup without the parity to me. I would said it basically a RAID 0.
Also you metioned "I guess that previous spare must really have gone 'bad', despite having never been used! "
I wiped everything out, I selected the 3 disks and clicked on "Create RAID Set" with RAID5 selected and the "Use unassigned drives as spares" option checked. The 3rd disk has always been marked as the spare ever since then. You do not have a choice to create a "RAID5 setup without the parity". If I wanted a RAID0 I would have chosen a RAID0! raidutil now says
% sudo raidutil list raidsetinfo
                                     Total     Avail
Raidsets      Type       Drives       Size      Size Comments
RS1           RAID 5     1,2,3,4    5.23TB    0.00MB No tasks running
Every time the system would 'lose' Drive 3 on boot, I would just keep rebooting until it was 'found', and then manually re-assign the now-'floating' drive as the spare - and the RAID would rebuild.
There was never a problem until the day that prompted this post - when it would not find Drive 3 no matter what I did. I turned the Mac Pro off for several hours until the drives had all cooled down and it still did not find the drive. I left the machine on but unmounted the degraded volume until I got the new replacement drive.
I really don't understand what you are getting at. It's like you are trying to tell me I set it up as a 4-drive RAID5 with no parity(!) and that I was in grave danger because one of the disks was gone. The actual RAID contents (spread across Drives 1, 2 and 4) were never in danger, unless a 2nd disk had failed while the spare was not seen by the Apple RAID card. I wasn't too worried about that happening.

RAID card in 2009 Mac Pro & EMC Retrospect 8.x: Experience

I spent the last few days in the often bizarre world of trying to figure the best way to utilize the 2009 RAID card with the newly released version 8 Retrospect from EMC (Iomega). Here's my warning: From my experience version 8 and the RAID card do not get along at all and often result in that dreaded black screen stating that you have to press the power button and restart in multiple languages, meaning the computer has crashed really badly.
But let me start from the beginning:
we recently got 2 new Western Dig RE4GP 2TB drives which were installed in slot 2 and 4 and then RAIDed together (RAID 0 I think). I then tried to backup 700GB from a Seagate ES2 drive to the new RAID volume using Retro8. After a few minutes I got the black multilanguage crash sign, forcing a manual power off. Not good. A few more similar bad experiences and I gave up on version 8 and went back to version 6.1x. This version seemed to work much better and I was able to backup the 700GB data to the RAID volume. The next test was restoring the 700GB data on the RAID volume. So I wanted to restore the data to the same RAID volume, so the computer would be reading the Retrospect dataset and then writing the data back to the same drive. Maybe not optimal in drive throughput performance but surely technical feasible (yes, ideally you would backup the data to one/another drive and then restore the data to a third target drive, in my case the RAID volume). Turns out this too is a no go. After restoring 300GB the dreaded multilanguage sign appears and again, after inspecting the error logs, it seems the RAID card has just freaked out. At this point I am getting very mad at Apple as I can hardly find any really usable information on the RAID card anywhere on the web plus making a $6k computer perform in a rather delicate way which is not the usual way I experience Macs. Questions in my mind: Do the drives need to be in adjacent slots, is there a problem with the 2 TB drives, why can't the card read and restore to the same RAID volume, why does the RAID card crash the system so badly, isthe computer being damaged by crashing like this etc. I am getting the impression that this expensive RAID card's performance is kind of flaky and there might be some software issues. Also I have a suspicion (I have no way of proving it) that the RAID card might be using more PCI bandwidth than it should thus causing other problems I won't get into here. So after this rant my questions would be:
-anybody else had any success with Retrospect 8 and the RAID card?
-might my crashes not really stem from the RAID card but from some other thing I am doing?
-any pointers on things I might be missing?
There just seems to be so little user feedback on the RAID card here or elsewhere which I think might be because relatively few people have the RAID card.
Any advice would be great.

You realize that not all disk drives are certified to work with Apple's
RAID card?
Is the ES2 also controlled by the RAID card?
Those RE4s are very very new. Does Apple or WD list them as certified to work on that card? you know, the way they often use to in the case of SCSI controllers and disk drives.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306231
http://www.apple.com/macpro/technology/storage.html
http://www.apple.com/support/macpro/ - links to articles pertinent to Mac Pro such as Pro RAID card.

Mac Pro early 2008 2 x 2.8GHz Quad Core 10.7.5, replaced 4 x 500ghds with 4 x 3Tb and Raid card Raid5 them OK but can not load time machine back up as it does not see any of the 4 drives, neither does disc utilities, any thoughts?

On my Mac Pro, early 2008 2 x 2.8GHz Quad Core 10.7.5, replaced 4 x 500ghds with 4 x 3Tb. The Raid card Raid 5ed them OK but can not load time machine back up as it does not see any of the 4 drives, neither does disc utilities, any thoughts?

You don't see drives when using a hardware RAID only the volumes.
WD Green are not suitable for hardware RAID (or software RAID for that matter).
USB2 and TimeMachine are a disaster waiting to happen. I've used SATA (internal) and eSATA (using SATA PCIe cards) trouble-free.
I can't say I begin to understand your use or "choosing the install drive for the backup"
Install what?
You don't load TimeMachine. Maybe seems minor but that is not how to describe the behavior of software.
You read FAQ and How To http://www.apple.com/support/timemachine
Time Machine’s Gory Details:
https://www.apple.com/support/timemachine/
TimeMachine 101
https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427
Lion Recovry & TimeMachine
http://www.apple.com/support/lion/installrecovery/
http://www.apple.com/support/lion/
How To Restore Your System
http://pondini.org/TM/14.htmlMac OS X v10.7 Lion
Pondini's Blog: Time Machine - Troubleshooting -- B5. Would you like to inherit (or re-use) the backup . . . ?

Apple RAID Card after System Disk Failure: Volume visible but not mountable

Hi,
Im running a Mac Pro with 10.5.8. Server has a workgroup server. The Mac Pro is equipped with a Apple RAID Card running three 1TB SATA Drives and a SAS drive for the System. The three 1TB drives are used by a RAID5 to store the data the SAS drive was used for the system. After a power failure the SAS drive was dead and I installed a new drive and reinstalled the system with the DVDs that were in the box. After that the RAID5 is not mounted by the system anymore although I can sea it in the RAID Utility but not with its volume name but with the name R2V1.
What can I do to save the data on that RAID?
Thanks
Phil

It's tough to find info on your specific model but the Raid card listed in the Apple Store (http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB845Z/A?mco=MTY3ODQ5OTY) states you must use all SAS drives or all SATA drives with the card. Are you sure that the drive that died was a SAS drive?

Apple Raid Card: Raid-1 volume degrading

Hello,
I have 2 Raid-1 volumes running on a late 2009 mac pro with an Apple raid card. The second Raid volume has degraded now 3 times in the last 2 1/2 weeks. Raid utility is saying that the drive is damaged but when I shutdown, pull the drive out of the bay and push it back in and then restart it says that the drive is good. After assigning it as a spare the Volume rebuilds and lasts about a week until the same thing starts all over again. Perhaps the drive is somehow damaged but it seems more like a connection problem. If this is a familar issue to anyone and someone has a suggestion it would be greatly appreciated.

Maybe you need to do a full surface scan for bad or weak failing sectors.
Next time it drops out (or whenever you decide to remove it manually).
Use Disk Utility to Initialize with Write Zeroes option. This takes several hours.
If it completes without any error messages at all, it should then be good to use.
If Bad Blocks are found, they will generally be spared out by this process, and the drive can be good to use for a while, but is likely to fail within 6 months. You should consider moving it to light-duty or occasional use, such as backups.
Sometimes the Initialization will fail. If the drive is still under warranty, return it to the manufacturer for a refund/replacement. Original Apple drives have a one-year warranty, same as your Mac. Manufacturer warranties are often (but not always) 3 years or more.

Mac RAID card - expanding volume

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