MacPro Raid ?. Can I stripe 3 promise 450gb SAS drives.

I'm thinking about ordering a new MacPro Quad core 3.33ghz. Along with the raid card and 3 Promise 450GB SAS drives. Can I stripe across 3 drives or does it half to be 2 or 4.
Secondly can I put a SATA drive in the 4th bay and install OSX and use bootcamp to install windows? Then of course I would occas boot into windows.
Thanks for the help in advance.
Ray

Most people find the Apple RAID card too much trouble.
You want to check the Apple support pages for RAID card, too.
Can't mix SATA and SAS.
Can't run Windows natively (VM only).
Changes sleep behavior.
I'd invest in SSD or high speed SATA.
Having run 2.66 / 3.0 / 3.4GHz it really depends if it is worth the extra cost, but in any event, wait for Xeon 5600/3600s to come out.
http://www.apple.com/support/macpro/

Similar Messages

Raid 0 SATA on Promise Controller, Sata drive on Intel?

Hi all, wondering if I can run this setup:
(Specs in my Sig)
2 SATA WD Raptors, RAID 0 on the Promise controller
1 Maxtor 80Gig SATA on the Intel Controller
Is this an option or not?
I am setup on the Raptor's already and would like to install another HD on the Intel if it can be done like mentioned.
Thx for the help!
/D

Ok, I connected to the Intel SATA 1 plug and all is fine. WinXP found the drive, installed it and away I go.
Only other question I have..Is there a specific driver I should use for it now?
It shows up in the Device Manager as Follows in 2 places:
Disk Drives
Maxtor 6Y080M0
and
IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers
Intel(R) 82801EB Ultra ATA Storeage Controllers
Intel(R) 82801EB Ultra ATA Storeage Controllers
Primary IDE Channel
Primary IDE Channel
Secondary IDE Channel
Secondary IDE Channel
I'm not sure if it should show under SCSI and RAID Controllers.
Blazer: That link is dead. I would like to read the article if ya can find it again. Thx
Dirtnapper: I read another post here somewhere about what you are looking to do. It can't be too far back in the pages, possible in a link in the RAID guide at the top.
/D

MacPro RAID card not initiating recovery after defective drive replaced

One of my artists is using an Early 2009 Mac Pro on 10.9.5 (13F1077). On Saturday morning, while he was not in the office, Drive 1 warned that SMART was reporting early signs of failure. The RAID card degraded the RAID set. I replaced Drive 1 and marked it as a global spare; but recovery is not initiating. I have, subsequent to installing the drive and marking it as a global spare, rebooted the Mac Pro; but the RAID Utility is not showing any Tasks running, and especially nothing about rebuilding the RAID set. As of now, the RAID set and RAID volume are not available. It appears that I can either try to preserve the data on the drives, or I can attempt to manually rebuild the RAID set; but not both. Unfortunately, the artist had all of his projects on the RAID and had not backed them up to servers at the time of the failure.

If a Disk Fails If a RAID set or volume becomes degraded because a disk has failed, you can use RAID Utility to identify the disk that needs to be replaced.
Note: If your RAID setup includes a spare drive, it is automatically incorporated into the RAID set, and the set switches from degraded to good as soon as the recovery process finishes. If there is no spare, the set will remain degraded until you replace the failed drive, and if a second drive fails before you replace the first, you could lose data.
To replace a failed disk:
1 Open RAID Utility, select the RAID set or volume that is displaying a problem status indicator, and look for a drive bay with a red status indicator. The bay numbers in RAID Utility correspond to the numbered drive bays in your Mac Pro or Xserve.
2 Replace the bad drive module.
3 Use the Make Spare command to set up the new drive as a global spare. If no spare was available when the original drive failed, the RAID card uses the new spare immediately to rebuild the affected RAID set and volumes. If a spare was available at the time of the failure, it is already incorporated into the affected RAID set, and the new spare remains available until it is needed.
https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA318/en_US/RAID_Utility_User_Guide.pdf

MacPro RAID card - best drives?

Hey, anybody have any experience they'd like to share on a good set of drives to go with the Apple RAID card? I want to get 4 and I'm looking for maximum speed, but I can't break the bank, so no Raptors.
cheers,
-r

Well, save your $$ and just DON'T! get the Apple RAID card, then you could afford some decent drives.
600GB 10K VRs $279 x 2
OWC SSD 100GB x 2
As for what drives, bare in mind -
If you read the Apple Support Mac Pro link to RAID card FAQ:
Question: *Which drives does Apple support for the Mac Pro RAID Card and the Xserve RAID Card?*
Answer: Only Apple SATA drives and Promise 450GB SAS Drive modules sold through the Apple Store are supported for use with the Mac Pro RAID Card (Early 2009) and the Xserve RAID Card (Early 2009). Apple 300GB SAS Drive modules are supported with the Mac Pro RAID Card (Late 2007) and Xserve RAID Card (Early 2007). Drives must be either all Serial ATA (SATA) or all Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives. SSD drive modules are not recommended for the Apple RAID Card because these drives use their own on-disk cache and cannot take advantage of the protection provided by the battery-backed cache on the RAID card.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1346#faq8
People do try and use retail SATA drives, with mixed results. I have never seen anyone mix SAS and SATA.

Xserve (early 2008) with SAS drives

Greeting All,
Can Xserve (early 2008) add SAS driver in any bay of the chassis? Or it will like MacPro need add RAID card in it.
Thanks,
Spin

Yes, SAS and SATA Apple Drive Modules (ADMs) can be mixed in Xserve.
If you want hardware RAID, you need the add-on card.
Quoth the current Xserve technical page "Three independent hot-plug drive bays with support for SATA or SAS drives; support for up to 3TB of hot-plug internal storage using the following Apple Drive Modules:
80GB 7200-rpm SATA with 8MB disk cache
1TB 7200-rpm SATA with 32MB disk cache
73GB 15,000-rpm SAS with 16MB disk cache
300GB 15,000-rpm SAS with 16MB disk cache"
And here's the obligatory official [ADM compatibility article link|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1219].
Other potential expansion options include outboard direct attached storage (DAS) via SCSI or SAS and a PCI-X or PCIe controller, outboard storage via Network Attached Storage (NAS), or outboard storage via Fibre Channel (FC) Storage Area Network (SAN) storage via PCIe controller. If you're looking at SAS disks here specifically for performance, I'd tend to go to DAS SAS or FC SAN storage as potential alternatives; they're toward the higher end.

SAS Drives and 2006 Xserve

Can I fit 450Gb SAS drives to a 2006/7 Xserve Quad-Core Intel Xeon 2.0GHz without the need for a Raid Card?

Try http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1219 That might help...

SAS drives on RAID5

Hi
I have connected three SCSI/SAS drives(600GB each, i.e.1.8TB on C drive) on RAID 5 with extra/separate 600GB SAS drive as Drive D(on SCSI controller too);. Can anyone mention how can I save PageFiles, Media Cache, Media, Projects, Previews and Exports files among these drives please?? Thanks

What is the specific reason to use three disks in a raid5 and a separate disk? Why not a four disk raid5?
Assuming a single disk has a sustained transfer rate of 120 MB/s, your raid5 will deliver - depending on your raid controller - around 200 MB/s. However if you were to use a four disk raid5, that would increase to around 300 MB/s.
Currently your fastest disk is the raid5, so from a performance POV that would be the ideal disk to store your page file, previews and media cache files on, but from a storage efficiency POV, the single disk would be more attractive.
My initial reaction, without knowing your arguments for the 3 + 1 configuration, would be to use a four disk raid5 array and store everything, page file, previews and media cache next to your project and media on the same array. Easy to configure and maintain.

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.

Erase old error messages of MacPro RAID Card?

Hi there.
I changed HDDs in my MacPro, they were configured as an RAID 1 using Apples RAID Card.
After mirroring the old System to the new (RAID 5) System, there are several error messages left in RAID Utility - where are they located to delete them?
Maybe I was wrong simply to change the HDDs, but is there a chance to solve that issue?
Thanks in advance.

Get someone on ebay to buy your over priced under supported card.
Or accept the 2.2TB (some people only got the 800GB portion which needs to be set as free space).
Or use 2TB drives.
Or external RAID but watch out for ATTO SAS and their Java program that doesn't work.
WD RED 3TB drives are designed for NAS RAID, firmware to support RAID TLER.
SoftRAID 4 makes a nice software RAID and does a good mirror with three drives in stripe reads (mirror only begins with minimum of two).
NO Apple just won't can't whatever offer a card and firmware. Odd with all their GUID support for large volumes isn't it.
It is designed for smaller SAS drives in today's world. And for RAID5 on 3TB and issues with battery... POS throw it up on ebay!

MacPro Raid Card single drive size limit

OK this is a follow up to a previous question about the upper size limit of a single HD that the Macpro Raid card can address.
It was pointed out to me that "The Apple RAID card cannot address more than 2.2TB of a drive" by Mr. Grant Bennet-Alder. So I am assuming that a 2TB SAS will work.
I plan to RMA the 4TB drive (that was not recognised), so my question is will this drive work instead?
Seagate Constellation ES 2TB 6GB/S SAS 7200RPM 3.5in (ST2000NM0001) Hard Drive - setup as JBOD.
It's not that I don't believe what Grant has said, it's just that I don't want to RMA this drive as well, using the old wood working philosophy of 'measure twice, cut once.'
And I spent 2 hr looking for this info on Apple's support site without any luck.
SYS INFO
MacPro 5,1
2 X 6 Core 2.93 GHz Xeon
Mac Pro RAID Card
Bay 1: 450GB Seagate Cheetah SAS -JBOD
Bay 2: 450GB Seagate Cheetah SAS - Raid set 1
Bay 3: 450GB Seagate Cheetah SAS - Raid set 1
Bay 4: 2TB Seagate Constellation (potential drive) to be JBOD
Raid set 1: Raid 0 - 900GB
OWC Mercury Accelsior 240GB
ATI Radeon HD 5870
Mac OS X 10.6.8
All software updates current and applied
Thanks
-Robert
Previous thread:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/21675625#21675625

If a Disk Fails If a RAID set or volume becomes degraded because a disk has failed, you can use RAID Utility to identify the disk that needs to be replaced.
Note: If your RAID setup includes a spare drive, it is automatically incorporated into the RAID set, and the set switches from degraded to good as soon as the recovery process finishes. If there is no spare, the set will remain degraded until you replace the failed drive, and if a second drive fails before you replace the first, you could lose data.
To replace a failed disk:
1 Open RAID Utility, select the RAID set or volume that is displaying a problem status indicator, and look for a drive bay with a red status indicator. The bay numbers in RAID Utility correspond to the numbered drive bays in your Mac Pro or Xserve.
2 Replace the bad drive module.
3 Use the Make Spare command to set up the new drive as a global spare. If no spare was available when the original drive failed, the RAID card uses the new spare immediately to rebuild the affected RAID set and volumes. If a spare was available at the time of the failure, it is already incorporated into the affected RAID set, and the new spare remains available until it is needed.
https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA318/en_US/RAID_Utility_User_Guide.pdf

XServe Early 2008 (MA882LL/A) + RAID card SAS drive capacity question

I've tried searching the web and support forums, but haven't been able to find a clear answer to the following question:
I have an XServe Early 2008 (MA882LL/A) with the Apple RAID card and three 73GB SAS ADMs. It's been working great for the last two years. I'm about to upgrade it to 10.6 Server, and if possible would like to swap in larger drives at the same time (since it'll be down for an afternoon anyway). However, only 73GB and 300GB SAS ADMs were ever offered for this model, and Apple says that the Promise 450GB ADM is not compatible with it. What I can't determine is whether I can put a larger drive (notably, a Seagate ST32000444SS) into the Apple ADM sled. The RAID controller seems to have no problem with large SATA drives in the SATA sleds, which seems like a good sign, but I'd rather not order $1K worth of new drives and discover in the data center that they don't work.
Does anyone know definitively whether or not larger drives will work in SAS ADMs with this model of XServe? The RAID controller firmware is current (hardware rev 1.0.0, firmware rev M-2.0.3.3), if that makes a difference. I've read all the docs I can fine--I'd be happiest with an "I tried it and it did/didn't work" kind of answer .
Thanks much,
Amanda Walker
Reston, VA

Good morning
I am watching this thread as well. I have two of the same servers (without the RAID card) and have wondered the same thing as I migrate to Snow Leopard and as my data drives continue to fill up. Apple techs and local service techs have not been willing to endorse Amanda's solution for me and have stuck to the Apple Drive Compatibility chart which certifies 73 and 300 GB SAS drives only for this model XServe.
Thanks for any info you might provide.
Greg
PS Amanda, I would be interested in one of your 73GB SAS drives in an ADM as a boot drive should you decide to surplus one or two of your drives.

Does my macpro work with SAS drive?

I got seagate SAS drives, and tried to plugged to the mp, apparently my os doesnt see them.
here is the spec
Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro1,1
Processor Name: Dual-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 1.33 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MP11.005D.B00
SMC Version: 1.7f10
Does my macpro take SAS drives at all? or it can only support sata?

You need a controller, such as $799 Apple Pro RAID or 3rd party.
Comparing SAS to SATA, but doesn't take into account the VelociRaptor
http://www.barefeats.com/harper13.html
WD VelociRaptor.
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15174
http://www.barefeats.com/hard103.html
http://www.barefeats.com/hard106.html
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western%20Digital/WD3000GLFS/
http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=Product.display&product_i d=180
There are recent thread on using SAS.

MacPro RAID SLOW?

I keep reading Disk Whack test results online using Aja's System Tester with setups just like mine and my results are pitifully slow. I have 2 Seagate 750 GB 7200rpm drives setup in a Raid 0 stripe and an Apple Raid Card. With NOTHING on the drive I'm getting roughly a write speed of 78MB/s and a read speed of about 90 MB/s. Everywhere else I've seen this config tested using all the same parameters I'm seeing results more than double that. I called Apple support and got nowhere. Any ideas would be GREATLY appreciated. I'm thinking of going with a CalDigit Raid Card and drives but I still want to know what's up with this config first.

I get almost identical readings on the RAID at 60% capacity and at 0% capacity. 78 write and 90 read.
Here is my Raid Utility setup. Maybe someone can spot an issue in here:
Mac Pro RAID Card:
PCI Slot: Slot-4
Hardware Version: 1.00
Firmware Version: M-2.0.3.3
Expansion ROM Version: 0018
Shutdown Status: Normal shutdown
Battery Info:
Firmware Revision: 1.0d19
First Installed: 3/8/08 12:19 AM
Last Date Conditioned: 10/22/08 1:41 PM
State: Working battery
Fault: Normal battery operation
Status:
Charging: Yes
Conditioning: No
Connected: Yes
Discharging: No
Sufficient Charge: Yes
Drives:
Bay 1:
Product ID: ST3750640AS P
Serial Number: 5QD1PT1P
Firmware Revision: 3.BTH
Type: SATA
SMART Status: Verified
Capacity: 698.64 GB
RAID Sets: R0-1
Status:
Assigned: Yes
Failed: No
Foreign: No
Missing: No
Reliable: Yes
Roaming: No
Spare: No
Bay 2:
Product ID: ST3750640AS P
Serial Number: 5QD1P9X5
Firmware Revision: 3.BTH
Type: SATA
SMART Status: Verified
Capacity: 698.64 GB
RAID Sets: R0-2
Status:
Assigned: Yes
Failed: No
Foreign: No
Missing: No
Reliable: Yes
Roaming: No
Spare: No
Bay 3:
Product ID: ST3750640AS P
Serial Number: 5QD1P96S
Firmware Revision: 3.BTH
Type: SATA
SMART Status: Verified
Capacity: 698.64 GB
RAID Sets: R0-2
Status:
Assigned: Yes
Failed: No
Foreign: No
Missing: No
Reliable: Yes
Roaming: No
Spare: No
RAID Sets:
R0-1:
RAID Level: Enhanced JBOD
Capacity: 698.45 GB
Available Capacity: 0 bytes
Drives: Bay 1
Volumes: Vol-R0-1
Status: Viable (Good)
R0-2:
RAID Level: 0
Capacity: 1.36 TB
Available Capacity: 0 bytes
Drives: Bay 2, Bay 3
Volumes: R2V1, Vol-R0-2
Status: Viable (Good)
Volumes:
R2V1:
BSD Name: disk3
Capacity: 698.57 GB
Read Command Size: 2 MB
Read Ahead Margin: 16 MB
RAID Set: R0-2
Status:
Degraded: No
Inited: Yes
In Transition: No
Viable: Yes
Vol-R0-1:
BSD Name: disk1
Capacity: 698.45 GB
Read Command Size: 2 MB
Read Ahead Margin: 16 MB
RAID Set: R0-1
Status:
Degraded: No
Inited: Yes
In Transition: No
Viable: Yes
Vol-R0-2:
BSD Name: disk2
Capacity: 698.45 GB
Read Command Size: 2 MB
Read Ahead Margin: 16 MB
RAID Set: R0-2
Status:
Degraded: No
Inited: Yes
In Transition: No
Viable: Yes

Expand MacPro RAID?

Hi gang,
I have a MacPro with Apple's RAID card. I have 4 x 1TB drives installed, one as the boot disk and the other 3 in a RAID 5 array. I was thinking about swapping the 3 RAID drives for 1.5 TB drives. Can the Apple RAID card handle this? I am imaging that when I swap a drive, the old contents will be copied to the new drive from the redundant data on the other 2 RAID drives. When I am done this process with all 3 of the drives, then what? Will I still have a RAID set the same size as the original, or will I be able to use the new space?
Cheers!

There are several ways to expand your capacity. With Apple RAID card, you are limited to 4 drives,
so you may need to remove those 4 drives and put another 4 new back to MP.
When you need to access your old data in old 4 drives, you then unplug the existing 4 drives and put the old one back.
But that also means your data are in different RAID/Drives which may not be the perfect solution for you and you wiil have to re-seat the drives all the time.
There is another way to expand your internal RAID to external drives. Take a look at CalDigit website.
They have their RAID card that works seamlessly with MacPro 4x internal drives, then you can expand your storage to another 3x HDElemnts (4 drives in each Element).
In other word, you can increase your RAID capacity to 24TB, 1.5TB/each, 4 internal, 12 external.
FYI -
http://www.CalDigit.com/RAIDCard/raidcard_flexibility.html
http://www.CalDigit.com/HDElement/hdelement_12drives.html
When you expand the RAID capacity, you will also need to increase File System size in MacOS, and iPartition can do very good job for you -
http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition.php
In fact, I just read a very good review on creativecow.net talking about HDElement for video editing and general purpose
http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/228/686
Hope this helps!

K9A2 Platinum not loading raid drivers sb600 or promise for raid 0

I am tired of trying by myself, hopefully you guys can help me out Ive been fighting this thing for 2days now and i hate this computer I'm on that feels like 28k dial up.
i know theres the promise plugs and the sb600, and i know they have different drivers. i also know that you have to disable the sb600 raid to get the promise working and vise versa *read the manual for that*. i set up the raid in raid configure *<alt-f>* and set it to raid 0 and assign the raid, and its fully functional.
the problem is when it comes to boot windows i hit f6 and then use the drivers i got off the cd...or website *two floppy's* and pick the i86 raid configuration *windows xp not 64, 64bit one is corrupted on both disks as well* it gets through that part, i format the drive *it sees in in raid in fast configure and in windows format, not in bios* and then go to install. it begins to install and stops on the first file FTT.inf, it apparently cannot read it, which is the same file on the disk if i am not mistaken. i have tried to install about 100times,if not more with different configurations in the bios.
the settings i have now for raid set up in the bios are:
integrated peripherals
extra raid controller enabled
in I/O devices on chip sata controller disabled *tried both enabled and disabled same problem*
it does not show drives in the sata ports but i figured that since it only shows 1-4 and the internal promise are the 5/6 ports.
i have formated and re-installed the drivers on the disks multiple times ive also tried the sb600 drivers disabling the extra raid controller in bios setting raid *it finds it in the 1/2 slots then 1 as raid* configured it in the raid set up as well but the same problem arises except its not FTT.inf its ahcix86.inf that errors. skipping the files *which is obvious but i tried it just to see what would happen * causes blue screen on reboot and another error of the same type at 99% but .sys file this time.
i have installed windows on one drive and booted up using the same drivers was able to configure everything was slightly inclined to just say screw it 1 drive it is. but it was a shame since i bought them both to raid 0 em from the start. loaded windows up and even installed drivers.
i also heard that u need to do full format sometimes to get the raid to work if you have tried both raid drivers so i did slow fat format... no avail did it twice. and fast the rest. if you guys know of any boot-able type formating program that i could throw on a floppy disk that would be great too, if thats the case.
i am at a wall and frustrated as all hell with what Ive done so far hope u guys can help me out, tried to be as detailed as possible but i bet i missed something .
rig specs*dont know if this will help but w/e*
msi K9A2 platinum
amd 4200 duel core socket am2
1gig of patriot 667 ram 512x2
ati x1900gt video card
Samsung spin point 160gb sata drive x2 *praying to god to put it in raid 0 once again*
THX FOR READING :D

Quote from: asd9000 on 17-May-08, 08:51:19
did all those settings. and have the newest and the disk version of the drivers.
do u guys really think that it not being able to find the driver file a power issue? either way i ll do anything at this point i rewired some stuff where the video card has its own rail and the hard drives have theirs with the cd-rom drive. took out my fan controler and really power hungry after market video card fan replaced with an old 60mm fan.
Error once again... ??? DAMN FTT3.inf file
edited: cause i sounded like an angry a$$hole with that first line :P
Stop swearing here! It's NOT allowed.
As for the floppy, goto the command prompt of a Windows machine, then type "format a:" and let the floppy format, if your floppy shows any error throw it away and try another.
It's not uncommon floppies fail.

MacPro Raid ?. Can I stripe 3 promise 450gb SAS drives.

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