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.

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Apple RAID Card, 4 SAS drives, 1 bootable large striped volume?

I have an Apple RAID card and 4 SAS 250GB drives. I did the migration when I set up the RAID to give me 1 drive for my bootable OSX volume and the other 3 combined into unused unpartitioned space.
But I want all 4 drives combined and striped for one large bootable OSX volume. I'd prefer not to have to reinstall OSX to do this.
Do I need to buy a utility? Can I use Disk Utility or the Apple RAID Utility? I've done searches and read all the help and can't find an answer.

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 - 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.

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

Apple RAID Card and 3TB Drives only show 2.2 TB

I tried a 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT drive in the July 2010 Mac Pro (and a Jan 2008 Mac Pro) on the RAID Card that came with the machines (so one is the RAID Card now shipping) and both show a maximum of 2.2 TB with a 3TB drive.
I'm curious if anyone else has tried this with different results. Any luck in getting the RAID Card to see the full 3TB in the drives?
By the way, without the RAID Card, the Mac (OS 10.6.4) sees the full 3TB, but not with it.
Anyone else seeing this?

Okay. Seems Apple didn't plan for or certify 3TB.
However, Apple doesn't support using 3rd party drives. Some do, and in some situations, drives you would think work don't, or they work but only briefly.
When I said read FAQ I was thinking of all the points like this:
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
http://www.apple.com/support/macpro/
Apple Knowledge Base: recent changes:
http://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=articles

Macpro raid card(Battery is Missing)

MacPro 2010
I bought a raid card a month ago.
But I got a message "But Battery is missing".
My Raid Card is Corrupt?
Could you teach me the reason?

google translate says:
My macpro 2010 have the same problem, replace the battery to repair the same problem after the new battery Month 3 Months generated.

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

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!

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.

Non-Apple RAID card with internal drives possible on 2009 model ?

Hello there,
I have decided against the Apple Raid card, since it does not support any other drives than the ones sold through the Apple Store and it also only supports up to 1 TB drives.
My goal is to have 3x 1.5 TB drives in a RAID 5 array.
Does anybody know any hardware Raid 5 capable adapters, that can be used with internal 1.5 TB drives & the early 2009 Mac Pro model ?
Cheers,
Martin

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, ATTO and LSI, and Adaptec mainly owned the storage market for Mac controllers, and even then in those happy times we heard there was Voodoo in the land, and a curse on what were the Rules of SCSI Voodoo, and one had to be careful that a drive really was certified and tested, and one had to insure which firmware version one was talking about, not just any which firmware - and controllers also had to be updated as well.
Signal processing over SCSI with good active termination, cable length, and 160 pins (and cable strands) (and no noise or crosstalk, good insulation).
If one did all of the above, and was careful, you were rewarded with a working storage controller and array and the best possible performance at the time.
And sometimes you could venture off the reservation... a little, and some drivers could patch and work around bugs in firmware or other problems - just as bugs in cpu, boot firmware, and microcode can be patched by the OS kernel. And people would pay for retail drivers, or they would have to rely on the vendor's bundled driver (that may only work on their own drives and no others).
Hard Disk Toolkit, Silverlining and others made name for themselves, amoung others that now have faded into oblivion for most.
But it still exists when you venture beyond consumer and pro-consumer devices and venture to use FC-SCSI, SCSI, and SAS. And taking a chance when you try to use off the shelf SATA storage products and solutions. There are times when OEM drives really are OEM-only and a good thing; and times to avoid.
And there is no list of any kind of successfully used non-Apple drives, though there is word-of-mouth of a few that definitely need to be avoided.

MacPro RAID Card - working with SSDs in 2nd optical bay?

I am planning to get a MP wit the Apple RAID card in order to configure 4 internal HDs as a RAID5. Does anyone have experience whether this setup would be compatible with one (or two) additional SSDs (boot drive) which will be connected via the 2nd optical bay.
Does this work at all - I understand the RAID card changes from SATA to SAS ports. I am not interested to include the SSDs in the RAID setup but would like to know whether this would work at all or whether I should better plan without the RAID card.
Thanks
Tobias

I am planning to get a MP wit the Apple RAID card in order to configure 4 internal HDs as a RAID5. Does anyone have experience whether this setup would be compatible with one (or two) additional SSDs (boot drive) which will be connected via the 2nd optical bay.
Does this work at all - I understand the RAID card changes from SATA to SAS ports. I am not interested to include the SSDs in the RAID setup but would like to know whether this would work at all or whether I should better plan without the RAID card.
Thanks
Tobias

3rd Party SATA raid cards for internal drives?

All --
Apart from the discussion as to if RAID actually benefits a home desktop system, I am wondering if anyone has the lowdown on using 3rd party SATA raid cards to support the INTERNAL hard drives on the Mac Pro series?
My Mac Pro is still slated to be built at Apple and for now I have the minimum memory and HD spec being requested at Apple, with the plan to upgrade the memory and drives from OWC or another vendor.
I've toyed with the idea of utilizing Disk Utility's software RAID features (e.g. RAID 0 for scratch disks, RAID 1 for boot, RAID 0+1 for all else.) I've also toyed with the notion of searching for a hardware raid solution which would allow me to transfer the internal SATA cable runs from the motherboard to a host adapter card for an internal multi-channel experience (with options to create and break mirrors to external devices for backup purposes.)
So....
Has anyone experience or utilized 3rd party hardware raid controllers which can connect to the internal HD bays? Are there limitations to this (ie, does the boot drive HAVE to reside off the internal motherboard controllers, or can an internal hardware controller successfully boot the system) of which ought be noted?
Finally, in the event that a host adapter card cannot drive the interna bays, can anyone give feedback to hardware SATA cards to power external drive bays with support for Disk Utility (to allow RAID1 pairings of internal drives to external snapshot-backup drives)?
Thanks for your time,
Ian Poulin
Richmond, Va

I am wondering if anyone has the lowdown on using 3rd party SATA raid cards to support the INTERNAL hard drives on the Mac Pro series?
There are many 3rd party controllers that support the internal HDs if an internal iPass connector is used. The problem is that some are bootable but most are not.
The Areca ARC-1680ix-12 and the HighPoint RocketRAID 4320 are bootable. However, the system cannot be installed via the Apple DVD. Instead the user needs to clone a boot drive with the proper drivers to the boot volume on the controller and then boot from the 3rd party controller.
The other issue I found is that these controllers do not support Boot Camp. If Boot Camp is desired, my recommendation would be to leave the internal HDs on the Mac Pro internal bus intact and use the 3rd party controller for external storage. This method provides four internal bays that are bootable, support Boot Camp and can be used for system backups. I use the 3rd party controller for external storage for large RAID sets and hot swapping hard disks.
With the internal bays intact and external hot swap RAID storage available the user can support Boot Camp, multiple system volumes and large external RAID sets. From my experience using a 3rd party controller with the internal HD bays always has some limitations. The user usually does not realize it unit later when Boot Camp does not work or the computer fails on a system upgrade or the controller does not work at all with a new version of Mac OS X.
Staying with the standard internal Mac Pro bay configuration will be the best configuration to avoid compatibility issues with future versions of Mac OS X. It is rumored that the new Snow Leopard may require 64-bit drivers. If that is the case, I would expect most if not all existing 3rd party controller drivers to fail. Some drivers will be upgraded after a few months while others may not. Having the internal Mac Pro SATA controller intact should at least allow the Mac Pro to boot if my guess about compatibility issues is correct.
can anyone give feedback to hardware SATA cards to power external drive bays with support for Disk Utility (to allow RAID1 pairings of internal drives to external snapshot-backup drives)?
There are a large number of external controllers that work with Disk Utility. Here are some of my favorites.
1. FirmTek SeriTek/2SE2-E and the SeriTek/5PM
http://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/sata5pm2se2.html
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/firmtek/5pm/
2. Sonnet Tempo E4P
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/sonnet/mac-pro/
3. DAT Optic eSATA_PCIe8
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/datoptic/pcie8/
Have fun!

Raid card issue - missing drive

I have bought some new Mac Pro 2010 Dual 2.93GHZ Xeon (6 core) machine, with Raid Card and 4 2TB drives and then set up a Raid 1 and a Raid 0 on the machine striped for safe&speed as I use the machine for video editing and motion graphics. From the first day, I have issues with 3 machines (out of 5): the raid keeps failing. Both raids work fine, then without warning the Raid Set falls over. Every time it has fallen over, it is usually when the drives and the Raid are not being used. It commonly gives me this type of error - Drive 3:5000cXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX failure detected - Primary disk port unusable, previous drive status was inuse, followed by Drive 3:5000cXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX missing - Previous drive status was inuse. The drive (Bay 2 usually) in realy mising from RAID UTILITY Tool. After reboot the drive reappears and I can make it Spare, in order to rebuild the volume. In the first instance I thought it's about Power Management, but even after disabling HDD power off, I have the same situation.
Apple dealer is still looking at one machine, but... Did anyone meet similar behaviour?

I'm having the exact same problem, or at least really similar.
I thought I'd configure everything as RAID-0, all brand new drives. Those shouldn't crash very fast.
Big mistake of course... But the weird thing is, in the RAID_Utility it says all the drives are "green" smart: checked and status: good. But it removed one of the disks from my raid. Is there any way I can "plug" that drive back into my raid set? Because the drive is ok, but it's just de-coupled from the set....
ty!

OT (ish): ATTO raid card and Sonnet drive array won't mount

Hi,
It's slightly off topic I think, but the title says it all. My ATTO configuration tool says all is ok and all 8 drives are fine, but Finder doesn't show the drive array (8xdrives as RAID 5). ATTO support have told me how to manually mount the drives via a command line interface, but I'd really like to just turn the computer on and have them there on the desktop(!). While support is thinking about it, I was wondering if anyone had had anything similar and if they felt it was the OS as opposed to the PCI card? I'm running 10.4.11. Other drives (SATA and FW) mount fine.....
Cheers!
Todd.

Complete re-install worked

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

MacPro Raid Card w/ SAS Drives is battery required?

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