RAID card for a Macpro

I want to get a new Macpro with two terrabyte drives. The primary drive will contain the OS and applications and the other drive will be used for DV and DVCPRO HD. Someone from Apple told me to get a RAID card. Is there any reason to get a RAID card with what I want to do with FCP?
Thanks.

YOu don't NEED it...but it does come in handy. I have my OS drive installed in the empty area below the optical (spare SATA connection on the logicboard, so I used that)...then I have all four bays open for drives. I have one bay that I use for Time machine, one as a single SATA for files I like to store, exported movies and graphics and stuff, then I have RAIDED the last two as RAID 0. This is FAST, but unprotected. Now, you can have three Raided drives (do NOT have your SYSTEM drive in the RAID...no no no) for more speed. The RAID card offers Raid 5 protection, meaning if one drive fails you are still fine. You sacrifice some storage and speed, but it works. And the good thing is that it is a HARDWARE raid, meaning that if your OS crashes for some reason, your RAID is fine. Not so with the software RAID. If the OS dies, so does the RAID. I had this happen recently.
It is a tad expensive...$999...and THEY must install it. A lot of stuff needs to be taken out to make room. CalDigit is offering a card too for half the price, and with the added benefit of the ability to add drives EXTERNALLY with the card. Due out next month. www.caldigit.com. I am planning on getting this when it comes out.
Shane

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Apple Raid Card in a Macpro production system running 10.4.11 Server

We just recieved the Raid card for our main Intel Octo Core server After installing the card we realized said card was not recognized by 10.4.11 due to lack of drivers the drivers as stated by documentation should be part of 10.4.10 OR shipped with the card (we checked package time and again and nothing was there , are we having fun yet ??) to which we updated a long time ago since this is one of our production 10.4.10 Server is no longer an available install disk at the Apple store apple retailers etc and 10.5 Server is misery to install on our system upgrade path not working as of this time as in kernel panic crash on reboot. Apple does not put the drivers online for this card . I am looking for a kind soul that would have received the disk that should have shipped with the card that would be able to put it online so i can download the installer and recognize the card in 10.4.11 right now i am backing up my system and data to our xraids.
Current Setup is :
Raid Card in slot 1 fully charged battery (it has been way more than 72 hours).
4x1TB HD in internal setup.
1 Quad Channel FC Apple Fibre Channel Card
tied to Fibrenetix Qbex 1 Xraid fully populated with 500 GB HDs.
Total data size is about 500 GB total not including video feed that take about 1 TB and are already backed up to a networked drive. Sites while light occupy about 20 Gbs and WGM is about 300 users rich domains are in the 50 FDQN range . Upgrading manually to 10.5 on a clean install while a possibility would be a MAJOR pain where the sun rarely shines. 10.5.2 does not exist as a DVD yet so i would hope to avoid updating as of yet . Any help would be more than welcome.
Thanking you for your time and attention and waiting to read from you soon ,
Best Regards,

I have installed 10.4 server (from 10.4.7 UB DVD) on top of 10.4.10 (?) "user" on a 4 core MacPro (it came with the RAID-card installed (don't remember if it came with 10.4.10 "user" or earlier version).
You need to get at the "server.mpkg" install files from the 10.4.7 (10.4.8 or newer) server DVD and use that to install the server "bits".
After all upgrades the server now reports (In Server Admin overview):
System Version: Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Build 8S2169)
Server Version: Mac OS X Server 10.4.11 (Build 8S2169)
But the "user" version system that came with the 4-core machine reports something like:
Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Build 8S3169) (notice the 3 in 8S3xxx).
The driver for the RAID card is also on the user DVD but you need to do it like I did.
As I understand it this is an Apple supported way to do it.
This Server have been used a couple of months now.

What is the best e-Sata PCI RAID card for Mavericks.

What is the best e-Sata PCI RAID card for Mavericks. Bought a new MAC PRO with Mavericks and the older PCI 1095,3124 that I used on older MAC Pro does not work. The MAC sees it, but the drivers never show up as being installed. If I could find drivers that work or a recommended PCI card it would be appreciated.
Thanks

PM made sense - 6 yrs ago when disk drives were much slower. Today it is a bottleneck.
SAS makes more sense. Outside of SSD, no disk drive maxes out by itself one PM interface (an SSD will) but it also means just two drives are enough to do so. So check out why to avoid PM:
www.macperformanceguide.com

Wanted: Apple Hardware RAID Card for Xserve G5

I have some questions regarding the original internal Apple Hardware RAID Card for an Xserve G5.
1) Does it support native hardware RAID level 5?
2) Does anyone know where I can find one of these cards? I can't even find them on eBay.
3) I heard this card is based on an LSI board. Which model? Has anyone had success using the non-Apple version of the same model board in an Xserve G5 with internal Apple Drive Modules?
4) How do you hook up this card? Do I put it in the PCI slot and move the SATA cables to it or does the presence of the card just automagically take over the drives?
Thanks for all your help!

I heard this card is based on an LSI board. Which model?
Camelot is correct that this card is based on (is) the LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 150-4 card:
http://www.lsi.com/storagehome/products_home/internal_raid/megaraid_sata/megaraid_sata1504/index.html
However, it has custom Apple Firmware to support booting by a PPC Xserve G5 rather than a PC. Apple also provides a ported version of the LSI Logic "megaraid" program to manage the card.
There is a bug (well, at least one) in the Apple Firmware version that was fixed by LSI Logic in its PC version subsequent to Apple's branch off of the LSI Logic code tree for the firmware. Specifically, the card sometimes doesn't fully flush its write caches before it disconnects from the drive buses on graceful power down (doesn't happen on restart). Only known workaround is to turn off the write caches for all LUNs. I turned in a RADAR report (RADAR ID 4350243) under our support agreement back in November 2005, but no action since. I follow up every so often, but clearly this EOL product is not a priority.
Has anyone had success using the non-Apple version of the same model board in an Xserve G5 with internal Apple Drive Modules?
Won't work without the Apple firmware. Apple doesn't distribute the firmware. Been there, done that. Our Apple Hardware RAID card failed in an odd way shortly after installation - it still functioned as a RAID controller once booted from another drive, but you couldn't boot from it. believe that the firmware became corrupted, and that it could have been fixed by flashing the firmware using the "megaraid" program, but Apple Support didn't have a file to flash it with, so it was handled by an RMA exchange.
RAID 5 performance is degraded with the write caches off, but our load is not heavy. I guess you could script the turning off and flushing of the write caches prior to shutdown, and turn them back on again during the boot sequence, but you'd really have to be careful to handle things like restart to CD boot, etc. We value our data more than speed.
This was a very difficult bug to troubleshoot, because the RAID 5 made the mystery garbage blocks from space very hard to find repeatably. Finally came up with a repeatable test case. Fortunately, discovered while testing the Xserve prior to deployment, so no valuable data was lost.
Russ

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.

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!

Creating the best RAID setup for my MacPro using FCP

I have a MacPro, 2 x 3GHz Dual Core, 16GB ram, 4 x 500GB drives and I work in FCP 5.1.4 and with my Hardware setup I feel it should be faster and I've been wanting to set up a RAID but not sure how to do it, or the best way way to do it.
Out of the 4 drives I have, Drive one is my main drive (boot drive, apps etc.) Drives (2 & 3) which is a TB combined, I'd like to turn those into a RAID) to speed up rendering, editing etc. In FCP and Motion. Drive 4 is where I keep all my working files.
My files are backed up regularly onto external harddrives and kept offsite.
Can I leave everything I have on my entire system the way it is and just turn Drives 2 & 3 into a RAID that's best for this application? People who work in VIDEO I know do this all the time to speed things up but I can't find the steps for the best way to do this. Bits and pieces all over the place but I can't put this puzzle together.
Can you point me in the direction in how to do this?
As I'm doing this is there anything I should be careful about?
Please help me understand this process.
Just in case you need to know what kind of drives I have here's the info:
Capacity: 465.76 GB
Model: ST3500641AS P
Revision: 3.BTA
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk1
Bay Name: "Bay 1"
OS9 Drivers: No
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified
Volumes:
Startup Drive:
Capacity: 465.44 GB
Available: 367.86 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk1s2
Mount Point: /

My advice would be 'yes' to what you are saying... with the exception of the Softraid stuff - not that I think its wrong, but I've never used it, so I can't comment if you need it or whether the Mac OSX raid is sufficient - but others here say they prefer it so fair enough. You can see some comparisons here http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/softraid/351/
amug always have indepth benchmarks of stuff.
I wouldnt call myself an FCP guru, but I think that your suggestion of putting the FCP scratch disk and client, video files on the raid are the best idea. The scratch folder is essentially where the temp-rendered clips go, so its audio and video - you want that folder to be on a really fast volume. You also want your source video files to be on a really fast volume, so they can be streamed fast enough to play in realtime too when playing unrendered areas, or building a preview.
Some might say in FCP you get bast performance when your scratch disks and video files are on seperate disks. Thats totally true, so it can read from one disk and write to the other at the same time. But in your case you have a 3disk stripe, which is roughly 3x faster than either of your disks! So it would still be faster to have them all on the same stripe.
You can leave your FCP app on the sys drive, keeps things cleaner (drive1 for sys and appsm raid for data). You can keep your project files where ever you want, they're not very big and are kept in memory so dont affect performance at all. Though to stay clean I would keep it on the raid, so again the raid is for data, and you can back it up accordingly. The system drive is only for apps and system so you can back that up accordingly too (less frequently probably).
P.S. Technically your 'point 8' is inaccurate. After creating the raid you will not see drives 2,3 or 4. You will see only one 'volume' for all 3 drives. Overall your mac will have 2 'volumes': the system drive, and the stripe of 2,3,4. Physical drives and 'volumes' that mount in your OS are completely seperate. You can create multiple partitions in a single drive, or you can combine multiple drives into a single volume (e.g. using raid). But basically yes, you copy your client files back to the raid.
And remember, if any ONE of the disks in the stripe dies, you lose ALL of the data on the entire 1.5TB volume. So it is pretty important to backup regularly!!!!
(I dont wanna confuse you any more, but raid5 is a good option if you want more security and don't mind paying extra :P, you'll need more hardware for that, and more drives to make it worthwhile - but I would say skip that for now, as you can build your raid0 for free or almost free and use that until you think you need more)

Raid card for FCAL V890

Hi,
We would like to know whether V890 FCAL HDD supports hardware raid. If there is no internal raid for the HDD's which card needs to be installed so that the server supports raid 5 for FCAL disks.

There isn't any such card. The disk sub system in the V890 is JBOD and all the HBA options are are juat HBAs. You can use Solaris Volume Managet to configure the disks.

Compatible Graph Card for a MacPro 661-3932

Hi, I need to replace a damaged NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB for a MacPro 661-3932, please your help in order to get one compatible card... Thanks .. Ricardo

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Availability of Wi-Fi card for Nehalem MacPro (early 2009)

If I buy a new Nehalem MacPro from somewhere other than Apple, it does not come with a wi-fi card. So far, Apple does not seem to be selling the card as a standalone, only when purchased as an add-on to the computer.
Is this card the same as the card for the previous MacPro, or is it a brand new card? If brand new, is it available anywhere, or does anybody know when it will be? Alternatively, what is the best wireless N solution for attaching to a USB port?

Why would I not buy straight from Apple?
1 - I live in California. A purchase straight from Apple requires immediate sales tax, adding over $250 to the cost.
2 - MacConnection already offers the basic Nehalem MacPro for $110 less than Apple. No stock yet, but there will be soon.
3 - If I use my Amazon business VISA card at Amazon, I am in a 90 day promotion period during which I get 6 Amazon points per dollar spent, which is equivalent to a 6% rebate, saving another $200. I can use the same card at Apple, but then only get 3 points per dollar, cutting the rebate in half.
4 - Aside from that total savings of about $460, if I ordered from Apple, I would want to change the memory configuration from 6 x 1 GB to 6 x 2 GB. But doing that changes shipping time from 24 hrs to 2-3 weeks. If I have to wait that long, I might as well wait to see if I can get the wireless card elsewhere.

Blackmagic Intenisty Pro card for my Macpro - good idea?

Can anyone tell me the advantages of using a Blackmagic Intenisty Pro card in my Macpro.
We shoot 50% wedding films and 50% corporate films.
I am now shooting and editing in HD using my Sony Z1 and FCP then exporting as SD to Compressor.
I just think that shooting in HD gives the footage that extra punch and also gives me more editing options. I have read a lot about this card - which will limit the problems i have been having with Conforming HD footage in FCPs timeline which takes ages to render - or should i transcode to AIC or ProRes422 before editing?

What the card adds to the party here, is the ability to view your HD video externally on a video monitor, and allows you to capture it as ProRes. Which is better than the AIC codec. ProRes files will render a lot faster than native HDV files, and they are visually lossless. Capturing to the AIC will lose quality
Jerry

What is the best RAID configuration for a MacPro as a Logic User?

There ought to be a universal answer to this question: what is the best RAID configuration for Logic Mac Pro users? I will be more specific.
I use Logic Studio, Reason, Ableton, and Motu Symphonic Instrument simultaneously.
I want to fail safe my precious audio files and improve performance as the system reads/writes data from multiple files, from audio tracks to digital samples.
I want to run video files simultaneously to do nifty audio soundtracking to video.
Here is the configuration I have in mind.
HD 1: OS and Logic Studio, Reason/Ableton samples etc. software (non-raid) (250 GB)
HD 2/3: MIrrored RAID set for AUDIO FILES (500 Gb identical pair)
HD 4: Video files / Bouncing (1 TB)
Makes sense right? A disk for reading software. A pair of 500 GB disks for reading/writing audio files and sessions in mirrored array. A 1 TB disk for video and bouncing. The main question I have is, for audio files only, is striped or mirrored better? 64K blocks the best? And are there any more details. I assume to do this in Disk Utility.

Well, both Mirrored and Striped have their pros and cons. If you use mirrored, it will offer no better performance than the spec'ed drive along with it's sata bus speed. The plus point is, if one drive goes down, you have the second as a backup as the complete contents of one drive are mirrored on the other.
With striped you will get a performance boost because all files (for example a single project) will get written across both drives and hence split the load on the drives and the SATA busses. The drawback is that you'll have to make sure you have a good, regular backup schedule in place because when one of the drives goes to drive heaven, you're going to be stuffed without a full backup of both drives.
Exactly what performance boost you'd get will depend on your project, number of files, size of files, fragmentation of files, track count etc. You may find it would be easier to use the 3 drives straight, with no raid and have:
HD 1: OS and Apps. No samples at all.
HD2: Audio Files for Logic projects
HD3: Reason, Ableton, Logic etc instrument sample library
HD4: Video and bouncing.
Which is what I ended up doing although I use HD4 as an interchangeable backup for HD1 and 2.
There is no universal answer to this as each must make their own choice based on their preferences and needs. Mirrored will give you full backup but on-site, in machine backup. Not much good if something untoward and drastic happens to the physical machine. I think a few people toy with striped RAID but fall on the side of using the drives straight, as in their projects they don't see a big enough gain over splitting the data across your 3 remaining drives without RAID. Studios that seriously consider raid often go out and get a dedicated raid that can offer more variations than raid 0 or raid 1 (Striped and Mirrored) and better throughput.
I hope this helps a little and not just added to the dilemma.

Please advise good RAID card for MSI 745 Ultra

I wish to add a RAID controller,
so that I may have a backup of my data drive
(IBM 40gb 7200rpm ATA100).
I have purchased an identical drive
that I want to use as a mirror ("RAID 1", I believe
this is called.
What RAID controllers would be the most compatible, fastest, and most reliable?
The drive will be doing some hard work, writing audio data while it is being received in Cakewalk SONAR.
So the write speed must be able to keep up with "real time."
Thank you so much for your advice!
Here is my setup:
MSI 745 Ultra (SiS 745 chipset)
AMD Athlon XP 2000+ CPU
512mb PC-333 DDR
ATi Radeon 8500
M-Audio Delta 44 & Audiophile 2496
Enermax 350w Power Supply Unit (do you think it's enough?)
Seagate 7200 20gb HD (WinXP on Primary Master IDE)
MAXTOR 20gb 5400rpm (Primary Slave)
SONY 52x CD-rom (secondary master)
... and ASUS 40x CD-RW (secondary slave)

3Ware makes the best IDE RAID controllers, hands down.
Basically, a 3Ware RAID controller is comparable to a SCSI RAID controller except that its IDE. Just about every other IDE RAID controller, the ones you find soldered on a motherboard in particular, is crap. Go 3ware, or don't go RAID at all. You won't regret it.

HT1918 WHY I CANT USE MY U.A.E. DEBIT CARD FOR MY MACPRO BOUGHT IN HONGKONG?

i bought apple macpro in hongkong. i used to use my uncles debit card of u.a.e before without any problem.
but now i cant use it in hongkong ? i want to buy something frm Itunes.....
anyone knows the problem ?

We are fellow users here on these user-to-user forums, you're not talking to iTunes Support nor Apple.
If you are getting a message to contact iTunes Support then you can do so via this link and ask them why the message is appearing : http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/contact/ - click on Contact iTunes Store Support on the right-hand side of the page, then Purchases, Billing & Redemption

RAID card failure

A client purchased an Apple RAID card for his MacPro and we installed it and configured all four of his 750GB drives for RAID 0 at his request. The card worked fine for a few weeks then it died. Apple says it will be another month before they can get a replacement card for him. This puts him out of commission for an unbearable period of time in his business.
If I remove his bad RAID card and just reconnect the drives to the motherboard the way they were originally, will we be able to access his files or does the RAID card work in such a way that it is the ONLY way to access the volume? Is there any other way to get to his file while we wait for Apple to send a replacement card?

Oh trust me... if I had my way he never would have gotten the card for what he uses the computer for. He bought it before he discovered us and asked us to install it. He was determined to get a RAID card and do RAID 0. His mind was made up. Nothing we can do about that now.
Now we have to deal with the current situation of a dead card and data he needs to non-destructively retrieve and make his computer usable again.

RAID card for a Macpro

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