Questions about migrating to a Mac Pro from an old MacBook Pro

Question

My present setup is a 2006 MacBook Pro with 3 external drives. One external eSATA RAID1 for music, another eSATA RAID1 for photos and video/movies, and the 3rd (FireWire) is for Time Machine. The internal 320 GB boot drive has 2 Boot Camp partitions for Windows XP SP3 and Windows 7.
Here's the new setup (as purchased):
• Mid-2010 ( MacPro5,1 ) Mac Pro 6-core 3.33 GHz
• 8 GB RAM (4x2 GB)
• 8 TB HD (4x2 GB Seagates)
• Apple RAID card
Mulling this migration over, these are the things I'm wondering about:
• I'll probably keep the 4x2 GB internals as a group, either going with two 2x2TB RAID1 volumes or perhaps considering a single 4x2TB RAID10 arrangement. The latter makes me a little nervous‡.
(‡ +Why? Not a fan of striping in general - plus, with my present setup, a problem with one of my Venus eSATA RAID enclosures was easily testable by removing the disks from the other "good" enclosure and substituting the other "bad" enclosure's disks to test inside a "good" enclosure - i.e. it was nice to have redundancy+ ).
Q. *Any thoughts either way on going with 2xRAID1 vs. 1xRAID10?*
Q. *Any Apple RAID card horror stories?*
• Therefore, I'm thinking of adding a cradle and disk(s) to the ODD_SATA ports. Probably a 256 GB SSD at a minimum for the boot drive.
Q. *Any issues booting OS X from an ODD_SATA-connected SSD?*
Q. *I understand you can't use Boot Camp on Apple RAID card-connected drives. True?*
Q. *I also seem to be reading that you can't boot Windows in any guise from an ODD_SATA-connected drive (SSD or HDD). True as well?*
Am I screwed? Forced to keep the MacBook Pro around for Boot Camp, no way to run it on the Mac Pro with this configuration?
• Memory. I understand these boxes run their memory with Triple Channel.
Q. *It sounds like at the very least I should rip out the 4th 2 GB DIMM. Probably replace all 4 with 3x4 GB or 3x8 GB (ECC) DIMMs, right?*
Yikes. Long post. Sorry. That's enough for now, I think.

Answer 1

now-disconnected iPass port
I don't think the 2010 model you ordered HAS an iPass port. The new Apple RAID card does not use one.
Follow a complicated procedure for trying to get the Mac to run all the SATA ports as AHCI so that Windows would 'see' all 6 of the SATA ports instead of what I presumed to be the current situation,
I don't think that applies to 2009 and later models either. The six SATA port are all listed in my Mac PRO as AHCI and all should be equivalent:
Serial-ATA Device Tree
-Intel ICH10 AHCI
. HL-DT-ST DVD-RW GH41N
-Intel ICH10 AHCI
. HL-DT-ST DVD-RW GH41N
-Intel ICH10 AHCI
. WDC WD360GD-00FLA2
-Intel ICH10 AHCI
. Kinston SSDNOW 30GB
Intel ICH10 AHCI
Intel ICH10 AHCI
You sure are digging up some stale information in your research
... but you are rapidly becoming an expert on the way it USED to be.
Now take the essence of what you posted just above, start a new topic, give it a catchy title, and see what other Users have to say!
Message was edited by: Grant Bennet-Alder