RAID 0 for Data on a Bootcamp setup?

I have a MacPro 5,1 running 10.8.5 along with Windows 7 through Bootcamp. Each of the operating systems is on its own separate SSD. I also have a conventional hard drive installed for data; the data drive has a GUID partition for OS X data and an NTFS partition for Windows data. I have another available hard drive and I was wondering if I could install this second drive, set up the two conventional drives as a RAID 0 (for speed) with a GUID partition and an NTFS partition. Since the drives will be installed in the MacPro drive bays, this would be a software RAID. Can this be done with both operating systems? Can I set it up using one of the OS's and have it recognized by the other, or would I have to set up the RAID twice, once in OS X and again in Windows? Has anybody tried this or will I be the first?
TIA,
Dennis

I would say the Windows PC would be your best bet but the odds of recovering anything at all is still extreme poor even there.
The way RAID 0 works is a bit like dealing cards. When you start a new hand in a card game the dealer deal a card to each player in turn. In the case of RAID 0 the computer is the dealer and the disks are the players.
So what you are attempting to do is undeal the hand. Now while that may sound trival, it is in fact not. Hence on of the reason that everyone says RAID Arrays should always be backed up.
Allan

Similar Messages

Mac Pro 4,1 SATA for OS and RAID SAS for data?

Hello, Can I setup a new Mac Pro with two SATA drives for the OS and install a RAID Card and two SAS drives for data?
Or do they all have to be SAS or SATA drives in the machine? Meaning I cannot mix SATA and SAS.
Thanks,
Dean

Even MacWorld magazine liked the OWC drives.
If you are serious about using an SSD drive, they are generally too small for, and do not give enough speed improvement to, extensive documents, movies, pictures, Tunes, and so on. You should consider moving the /Users directory to a traditional Hard Drive.
Blocks on SDD drives can sustain a finite number of writes, thought to be in the neighborhood of 10,000. Some Cloning software is thought to do an abusive number of writes during cloning, so it may be better to install the System from scratch onto your new SSD.
I am an advocate of occasionally consolidating free space on an SSD drive and Zeroing it. Since these drives tend to be organized internally as really big blocks, eliminating small "free" blocks (with leftover data in them) may allow some drives to do fewer slow Read-Modify-Write cycles. This practice is, at best, controversial.

Best use of RAID 0, for O/S or Video Editing data disk ?

I now have a RAID 0 setup of two 120GB discs (1 x P-ATA & 1 x S-ATA) as well as a S-ATA 160GB and a P-ATA 60GB.
Now what should I use the RAID disc for ?
My choices are:
P-ATA 60GB for operating system (current)
RAID 0 (220GB) for Video Editing Data
S-ATA 160GB for other data, swap file, My Documents and System Images.
Or
RAID 0 (220GB) for operating system (current) and swap file
S-ATA 160GB for Video Editing Data
P-ATA 60GB for other data, My Documents and System Images.
Or
S-ATA 160GB for operating system (current) and swap file
RAID 0 (220GB) for Video Editing Data
P-ATA 60GB for other data, My Documents and System Images.
Which will give me the best performance/balance for Games and Video Editing
Am I likely to hit any problems with using the SATA drive as the operating system drive, I thought I heard somewhere that XP wouldn't allow Drive C to be allocated to a SATA drive ?

If you do video editing, where speed pays, think that you should use Raid for this kind of work.

How do I use WD Raptor for OS/Apps drive and RAID 0 for Home/Data drive

So far I have configured my machine with a WD Raptor 74GB as the startup disk, and created a RAID 0 with the Seagate 250 GB drive (shipped with the machine) and a 250GB partion of a WDC 320GB drive. All drives were zeroed and I used the install disks to load Tiger on the Raptor. I backed up to a LaCie D2 1TB external hard drive with LaCie's Silverkeeeper.
I would like to use the WD Raptor as startup/apps/scratch disk and the RAID 0 for the user folders and other data. I would then like to create a RAID 1 with the RAID 0 and a 500GB partion of the LaCie 1TB external.
I have learned however that what I would like and what I can have are not always compatible.
My questions:
Is the Silverkeeper backup sufficent, or should I have cloned my previous system?
What folders should accompany the application folder on the Raptor? So far I have only put the app folder there and nothing works. I suspect things like 'application support' should be there as well.
Is there a way to keep my home folder on the RAID 0 without using Terminal or spending too much time as the root user? I tried copying my home folder onto to the RAID 0 and putting an alias in the user account I had to create while installing the OS on the Raptor. This kind of works but is not a particularly elegant solution.
I would appreciate any advice on how to proceed or if the proposed configuration is even achievable.

Photoshop files of 1GB+ can eat up memory and scratch. And the more drives for scratch, the better.
Some of the limitations are with the bus, bandwidth, and 'swapping' code in and out of different cores that is inefficient.
Compilers can do some, but from the time new hardware (8 cores) to seeing improvements to compiler, and out to software (applications) and OS, can take a year or more but provide in the neighborhood sometimes of 40%. In which time, newer designs will change the equation. Caching and VM will improve with Leopard, but beyond that...?
So... back to "read world" IF you are in the habit of working with 1-2GB images, then a pair of Raptors for boot is helpful, AND 8GB and more of RAM, AND 4-8 drives for scratch. (Think of those Sonnet Port Multiplier controllers and Fusion 500 style case for 5 drives on one port).
If you work with files smaller than 500MB range, your needs are cut way down.
150GB Raptor boot drive. Small. subtract 25% for minimum free space, 140GB formatted, kind of tight for some. But it handles 60% well.
The outer 30% of 465GB (RE2) is also fast and good performance. I partition large boot drives to keep the OS and apps contained in the outer 1/3.
Mac Pro Memory Usage and Performance
If your work flow means doing more than one thing at a time on your Mac Pro, then you will see significant gains if you spend extra to get the 8-core version. Our Photoshop CS3 actions were completed 39% faster on the 8-core when we had 3 other apps busy crunching. This advantage emerges in spite of the memory bus limitations of the 8-core Mac Pro.
http://www.barefeats.com/octopro3.html
CS3: Justifying 8-Cores
http://www.barefeats.com/octopro4.html
Pshop Test G5 Quad 16GB Raptor RAID
Photoshop and multi-core
http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/
Mac Pro 2GHz 4GB 10K Raptor 23" Cinema Mac OS X (10.4.9) WD RE RAID Aaxeon FW800 PCIe MDD-G4 APC RS1500 Vista

BPMon Setup: Check user for data collection

Dear experts,
I'm trying to configure Business Process Monitoring in our Solution Manager system and I'm stuck in the step "Check User for Data Collection". See screenshot. I mark this row and click on "Execute Selected". A background job is scheduled and finishes after some 6 seconds, But this step is still marked as "Activity not yet performed". Any idea how this can be solved? I read the documentation, notes and the troubleshooting guide but found nothing about this specific problem.
Many thanks for any help!
Calin

Hi Calin
The status will remain grey as long as there are clients in the managed system that have not been connected to the Solution Manager.
However, if there are clients the you would not like to connect to Solman on purpose, he can simply set the execution status to “manually performed”, then the activity will be set to green. I have attached some screen shots from a test system so you can see what I mean.
Best Regards
Mark

Raid cards for mac pro 2.66

i would like to set up a hardware card for my os as raid 0
(2 10,000 rpm hard drives)
and a hardware raid 1 for my data.(same/separate card ??)
are there any sudgestions on makes and models and compatability?
i am aware of the software raids provided by the os, i've heard they are not as reliable and fast as the harware solution, agree, disagree???

Yeah they say the software raid is good and I can't say first hand but I have heard good reports. In general I prefer hardware RAID but i setup server not clients so. Was using acard.com stuff for a bit but there offerings have gone down on the mac side. My current card of choice is Highpoint's Rocket RAID.
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/
Card works good and drivers all appear to be up-to-date with Intel based Mac's now. Nice web-GUI to the Raid controller. My only complaint could be OS related as opposed to driver but the Hot-Swap won't work right. In order for me to swap i need to drop the drives from the server and pull them. (alarms alarms, lol) Then put my swaps in. Seems the release call from the web-GUI does not kick the drive out right or the Mac OS won't let go of them even after un-mounting.

Using USB for Bitlocker in a Bootcamp install of Windows 7 x64 Ultimate on early-2011 Macbook Pro

First of all some details on my current setup:
Macbook Pro 15" (early 2011) with a i7 QM processor and 8 GB RAM, Superdrive and HD installed
Mac OS X 10.7.3
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate in a Bootcamp setup
Existing partitions on HD are EFI, MacOS X, Bitlocker Startup, Windows
I removed "Recovery HD" after creating DVD image contained in latest Lion installer from AppStore.
What I got so far:
It took some time to find a way for Windows getting a second partition to be used for Bitlocker startup files. Using existing partition layout I replaced previously existing "Recovery HD" partition for Bitlocker partition in Windows (after taking dd-based image of Recovery HD).
Recently I tried to enable Bitlocker and continued to fail on Bitlocker System Check claiming to have no access on USB while booting. And that's my issue ...
I read about using Windows' diskpart to have a GPT partitioned USB stick containing single NTFS partition. I tried to achieve the same with disk management in Mac OS X though it was creating a hybrid MBR/GPT setup that wasn't recognized by Windows at all. Then I tried partitioning in Mac OS X to have GPT partitioning, used Clonezilla Live CD's gdisk to apply hybrid setup another time. I even tried to do the whole partitioning in Linux using gdisk, but Windows still didn't recognize the formatted partition on USB stick then. So, the only way found is using diskpart in Windows to get a GPT-based USB-stick with a single NTFS partition.
I put my startup key there (attributed as hidden, system file) and tried to restart several times. On every boot Windows is prompting for inserting valid startup key as it wasn't found. The partition is encrypted already and entering the printed 48 digits recovery key gets me in every time.
If I keep the stick inserted the boot is noticeably delayed, but it's instantly continuing as soon as I unplug the stick. So there is something processing the stick ... I tried different sticks, but hope it's not related to using one special stick since they are used to support similar (equivalent) interfaces, aren't they?
Don't tell me about using TrueCrypt or similar as I prefer to use existing software instead of adding 3rd-party software doing things the same way. And for True Crypt USB must be readable at boot as well. And previous trials with different approaches rendered all failing at some point of setup. Finally, I don't want to reinstall existing Windows as it keeps me from working even more.
Found some post regarding trouble with Lion installations (e.g. I can't use rEFIt ... it simply didn't show up and this seems to be related to using Lion), found the KB article of Apple on preparing USB external storage for use at boot, but all troubleshooting hints didn't help.
What the heck is wrong with this setup?
EDIT: There is no problem to have Bootcamp starting previous Recovery HD partition now Bitlocker startup partition instead of originally prepared Bootcamp partition, which is encrypted now. This is in contradiction to other posts here. I'm sure Apple support isn't best choice to ask for support as this problem is MS specific and thus Apple won't care that much ...

Well, I've seen lots of those threads as well and most failed to manage cooperation of Bitlocker and FileVault, have trouble to get a second partition for windows to use with bitlocker or truecrypt etc. But these issues don't apply to me anymore.
Next there are threads instructing how to get a USB stick to work with Bitlocker claiming to have GPT instead of MBR so EFI is gaining any access on them. Those cases seem to work with MacBooks running with Windows, only, thus passing the issues mentioned in paragraph before as well.
And there is my confusion originating from: I can remember some sites claiming to have trouble with EFI on a Mac using Lion, but all those sites are older than Lion's final release date. So I don't know if there is a similar issue today or if I'm actually missing some option ... rEFIt isn't working with Lion according to the refit site itself. Some sites claim EFI is behaving differently on whether there is a super drive or not as Lion isn't supporting USB booting as long as booting from DVD/CD is available ... what's true about those facts? Is my problem related to having a super drive? Are things getting better as soon as I'm replacing my superdrive by a second internal drive? Is it that strange or some sort of plausible behaviour?
According to GPT, Windows 7 is obviously failing to properly detect hybrid MBR/GPT setups on USB sticks while that's what MacOS' disk manager is doing on having GPT-based single partition stick with exFat format. Instead of using the second hybridized partition it's accessing the protected part, only. If I'm converting a disk to GPT in windows everything works fine, but then without hybridized MBR ...
Regarding the fans I'm with you ... as soon as processor load is exceeding 5% the fans get quite noisy ...

What's the best RAID solution for my iMac / MacBook?

I think it's time I invested in a larger backup hard drive, and for data security I'm looking at 2-drive RAID devices. Is the Lacie 2Big Network good for this purpose? http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?pid=10953
What's the reliability and speed really like on such devices?
I have a 1Gbit switch that I could attach a network storage drive to, and the idea of having a public ftp area on it sounds quite cool and useful, anyone know just how secure it is?
What about replacing drives in these things - is it just a case of taking existing hard drive out of a caddy and putting a new one in? (same type, size and speed, presumably)
At work we have some dinosaur Dell servers that have big hardware RAID arrays in them, I've only just started using them myself but can see how versatile the concept is.. are there any drawbacks to having a small home hardware RAID setup?
Thanks!

If you are not limited to NAS, take a look at CalDigit for a great eSATA/FW800/FW400/USB RAID 1/0 external drive.
http://www.caldigit.com/CalDigit_VR/ , we will get one soon.
AFAIK, the CalDigitVR connects using either eSATA, FireWire 800, 400, and USB2.0. The RAID is configurable as performance (RAID 0), protected (RAID 1), or SPAN. The CalDigit's products are used by serious individuals, photographers, movie studios, etc. and are as bulletproof as you can get.
Everything is swappable (including the fan assembly) and can be daisy chained through FireWire port when out of capacity. If know you are using iMac, but if you have a MacPro, you can use their SATA kit to speed up to 200 MB/s !!!.
In the past, RAID protection doesn't come cheap but neither does true peace-of-mind. There are other solutions to be sure, but none offer the longevity and flexibility of the Caldigit products. And the best part is CalDigitVR 500GB starts at only $399.

Migrating data to a "new" setup, questions

Hi fellow Archers,
This is my current setup:
Atom+ION board with 3 SATA ports + 1 PCI card with 2 SATA ports.
Storage:
2x 2TB
1x 1.5TB
1x 1TB
They are all part of the same vg:
[root@ion ~]# vgdisplay
--- Volume group ---
VG Name lvmvolume
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 4
Metadata Sequence No 46
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 1
Open LV 1
Max PV 0
Cur PV 4
Act PV 4
VG Size 5.89 TiB
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 1544372
Alloc PE / Size 1544372 / 5.89 TiB
Free PE / Size 0 / 0
VG UUID E15rQM-mRJc-OLJH-C3Jo-NL6Y-g2ZQ-MP7PSz
I now have a new mainboard and a SATA controller card (PCI-E 1x) coming, with two new 2TB drives. Also a cheap small SSD on the way for the OS.
What I want to do: Migrate all data to a new RAID5 array consisting of 4x 2TB drives.
Is this possible without losing any data?
Thanks!

Shameless self-reply-bump;
I now have the new parts except the controller. When I get that I'm going to set up the new system, trying to migrate away all data off one 2TB drive so I can pull it out of the lvm volume group.
Then I can create a new RAID5 array with 2 new and 1 old 2TB drives and start moving the data to that one. When that's done, I'll move the other 2TB drive that was in the volume group, to the RAID5 array. That way I should end up with 4 2TB HDDs in RAID5.
I need to do some research first on what stripe size to use, filesystem, etc, as well as if it's best to have the HDDs on the controller (PCI-E 1x) or on the onboard SATA controller (which should be faster since it's not bottlenecked by the PCI-E 1x bus).
Thanks
Edit: New system installed, data migration ongoing. Managed to borrow a 2TB drive off a friend, migrated data to that so I could take one old 2TB out of the lvm, thus giving me 3 unused 2TB HDDs, on which I created a RAID5 array. Currently migrating data to it while it's initializing the parity etc...
[root@ion ~]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid0]
md0 : active raid5 sdc1[3] sdb1[1] sda1[0]
3907024640 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 128k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/2] [UU_]
[========>............] recovery = 42.6% (832443904/1953512320) finish=18091.5min speed=1032K/sec
unused devices: <none>
[root@ion ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 10M 236K 9.8M 3% /dev
/dev/mapper/lvmsystem-root
20G 7.6G 12G 41% /
shm 881M 0 881M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdd1 97M 20M 73M 21% /boot
tmpfs 881M 11M 871M 2% /tmp
/dev/loop0 124M 27M 96M 22% /var/lib/pacman
/dev/mapper/lvmvolume-home
5.8T 4.7T 1.2T 81% /home
/dev/mapper/lvstorage-storage
3.6T 2.1T 1.6T 57% /raid5volume
Edit: BEWARE!!
sata_mv: Highpoint RocketRAID BIOS CORRUPTS DATA on all attached drives, regardless of if/how they are configured. BEWARE!
sata_mv: For data safety, do not use sectors 8-9 on "Legacy" drives, and avoid the final two gigabytes on all RocketRAID BIOS initialized drives.
That was the culprit! I shrunk the device usage per partition like so:
Avail Dev Size : 3907025072 (1863.01 GiB 2000.40 GB)
Array Size : 11702108160 (5580.00 GiB 5991.48 GB)
Used Dev Size : 3900702720 (1860.00 GiB 1997.16 GB)
So it's using 1860 out of 1863 or so GB per partition, that way I should be safe corruption wise. It would be best to shrink the actual partitions (sd[b,c,d,g]1), but I don't know how to do that without messing everything up.
Last edited by Fackamato (2010-10-24 17:14:44)

Lync monitoring Details reports are not getting opened, Getting SQL error like "Cannot impersonate user for data source 'CDRDB"

Hi,
Two month before, We have deployed Lync 13 set up with lync monitoring and archiving service enabled. After configuring we have the Lync monitoring and archiving services are working fine... few weeks back I have changed the Admin Password
of the Lync Setup. After that Lync Monitoring and Archiving services are not working.
when I try open Lync monitoring service from web UI,
http://localhost/ReportServer_LyncMonitoring/
Web UI is opening but Reports home page is not Accessible , Getting error Like
"An error has occurred during report processing. (rsProcessingAborted)
Cannot impersonate user for data source 'CDRDB'. (rsErrorImpersonatingUser)
Log on failed. Ensure the user name and password are correct. (rsLogonFailed)
The user name or password is incorrect"
Please help me to trouble shoot this problem.
Thanks,
Rajarajan.D

Hi Rajarajan.D
You probably need to update the password against the CDRDB datasource in SSRS Report manager, take a look at this article: http://lyncme.co.uk/microsoft-lync-server-2013/cannot-impersonate-user-for-data-source-cdrdb-rserrorimpersonatinguser-error/
If this helped you please click "Vote As Helpful" if it answered your question please click "Mark As Answer"
Georg Thomas | Lync MVP
Blog www.lynced.com.au | Twitter
@georgathomas
Lync Edge Port Check (Beta)
This forum post is my own opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinion or view of Microsoft, its employees, or other MVPs.

RAID1 Partitions disappeared when one of the mirrored HDD is used as an external drive for data rescue.

Hi, I have mirrored build of two identical 1TB HDD in my Xserve Late 2006 (RAID 1) in Bay 2 and Bay3. When I took one HDD out and connected it as an external drive to my MacBook Pro, only the first partition appeared. That is, for instance, I have RAID partition A1, A2, A3 in Xserve but only A1 appears when the drive is connected to MacBook Pro as an external drive. Is there any way to let partition A2, A3 appear too? Thanks.

Oh, I didn't realise you were using the hardware RAID card for this. In that case, yes, that makes sense, you won't see the other partitions because they're handled by the RAID card. I admit I'd never tried it with a RAID 1 mirror where you might expect to - I've only used RAID 5 on the hardware cards where there's no expectation, of course, to pull a drive to relocate the data.
So you may ask why not just use a single partition for my RAID1 design. The reason is that I prefer to partition HDD because it is good for HDD lifespan. I don't like to design my parition schema to be just a single big parition with 1T Hard Drive since all data are going to be stored scattered and hence, taking longer for spindle reading.
I don't agree with most of this statement. I've not seen anything that indicates partitioning improves lifespan - for any given data, the disk spins the exact same number of times, and the heads move the same number of times, regardless of the partitioning - partitioning is only a logical, not a physical, construct.
As for the data being scattered and spindle latency, that's nowhere near the problem it used to be in the past thanks to faster spindles and larger caches. In addition, Mac OS X uses a dynamic reallocation/fragmentation system that automatically (re)allocates files as they're used, meaning you don't have the level of fragmentation that you used to have.
The primary benefit of partitioning is to restrict file system sizes so that you don't get a runaway proceess filling up the entire disk. Even that is less of a problem - when an 8GB drive was large it didn't take much to fill it, but you'd have to have a pretty rampant process to fill up a 1TB drive before alarms started ringing.

Why no RAID options for new disks?

Hi support group,
"My name is Shaun, and I am a mac-aholic"
I inserted 4 new 3TB disks into the bays of my Mac Pro (2012), and there is no RAID option for them.
How I got here:
Inserted the WD Red drives, and they were not initiated.
I "erased" the drives, gave them names, and they appear in Disk Utility in grey drives.
Went to set up the RAID, and move the drives into the RAID, but got an error that they could not be used.
It appears to me that disk utility is not allowing me to fully use those drives. I Have created RAID drives before with no issue in RAID1 with 3TB drives before on this machine. Am perplexed, I thought this to be the easy and simple part of my upgrade odyssey! Did I screw up the initialization? On all FOUR drives?
Now, if I click on the drives, the RAID option does not present itself.
FWIW, I am using OS X 10.9.5, on Mac Pro 5,1. I boot from PCIe card. My end goal is to create a 4-disk RAID 10 using the four SATA connections on the MP.

It was really pretty simple based on your feedback, I powered down, removed the drives from the SATA backplane, moved each drive separately to the USB enclosure, then re-"erased" in OSX-Etended. I ejected each drive when finished, and moved to the next one until all four were re-"erased". Then I restarted the Mac with all four in the SATA connections, and all four were visible and had the RAID option tab. I created the three RAID schemes (two stripe and one mirror), and dragged the drives into the RAID option. Then I hit "create" or some other command to finish the RAID.
Note that I did get an error on the RAID creation. From memory, this was "cannot create RAID without an unmounted disk" or something like that. I cleared the error, and then opened back up Disk Utility. All the RAIDs were listed, and were operational with the green "On" signal. I could read/write/transfer from the RAID. Once I transfer the data to this RAID, I will work on a way to test it, but if any risk to the data, I might just leave well enough alone.
For now, it seems I have a fully functional RAID 1+0 using the four HDD on the SATA connections in my Mac Pro 5,1.

Best practice for data migration install v1.40 - Error 2732 Directory manag

Hi
I'm attempting to install SAP Best Practice for Data migration 1.40 on Win Server 2008 R2 (64 bit).
Prerequisite error
Installation program stops with missing file error
The following file was not found
... \migration\InstallationWizard\BusinessObjects Data Services\setup.exe
The file is necessary for successful installation. Please connect to internet or refer to Quick Guide (available on SAP note 1527151) for information regarding the above file.
Windows installer log displays
Error 2732 Directory Manager not initialized
SAP note 1527151 does not exist or is internal.
Any help appreciated on what is the root cause of the error as the file does not exist in that folder in the installation zip file.
Other prerequisite of .NET 3.5.1 met already.
Patch is released since 20.11.2011 so I presume that it is a good installation set.
Thanks,
Alan

Hi Alan,
There are details on data migration v1.4 installations on SAP website and market place. The below link should guide to the right place. It has a power point presentation and other useful links as well.
http://help.sap.com/saap/sap_bp/DMS_V140/DMS_US/html/index.htm
Arun

Raid 0 for dual SSD's in optical drv together with RAID 5 in internal bays

Hi,
I would like to add two 100GB SSD's in the second optical drive space in RAID 0 for boot.
This can be done with a special bracket and cables to the SATA connections on the motherboard. So far so good.
Now I have 4 drive bays I could fill with 4x2TB black caviars for data and I was wondering if I can have those ran via the a RAID 5...
Anybody have advice as to wether this is possible and if the Apple RAID card is the preferred option?
Thanks!!
Thomas

Hi Thomas,
welcome on board
I think first of all your SSDs should support RAID. Secondly, what I learned reading the forum entries that Apple RAID card is far not the best possible option.
Why you would not like to use soft raid?
Message was edited by: Munas

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!

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