RAID Card Setup

Hey everyone,
This may seem like a foolish question, I'm sorry, but I'm trying to piece together my Mac Pro order.
I was planning on setting up two 1TB drives in a RAID 0 for FCP, and I was wondering if the (Apple) RAID card works with drives inside the Mac Pro, because, if it did, I assume using a hardware RAID instead of a software one would be less CPU intensive...
(Just so yall know - I know RAID isn't a substitute for backups, nor would I be booting off those drives - I'll save that for the Velociraptor...)
Thanks
Taylor

The cache is not very important for RAID-0 (it is vital for RAID-5). Any unused RAM is used for disk cache in OS X.
There is a single cable that connects the SATA signals from the four drive bays to a connector on the main logic board. When the RAID card is installed, that cable goes to the RAID card instead of the main logic board. All data to the drives then goes through the PCI-e bus and the RAID card. The SATA ports on the main logic board are left unused. With fast disk drives, the RAID card can become the speed limiting factor. Without it, each drive has its own SATA port on the main logic board.

Similar Messages

Xserve RAID Card: Is setup kept when reinstalling OS?

Hi everyone,
I have a new Xserve with 3x 1 TB and the RAID Card. The default setup is JBOD and of course I'd like to change that by booting from the DVD and setting it up. I know that I can convert JBOD to RAID while keeping the already installed OS. But since I plan to reinstall the OS anyway I was wondering if my chosen RAID setup will be preserved this way?
I believe this is a real Hardware-RAID so this should work, right?
Thanks
Björn

Thanks,
since the RAID can't be reconfigured while booted off one of the internal drives and since this can't be accomplished remotely using Server Assistant I need to reconfigure it with another (external) system. Is that true?
I suppose it could also be done directly at the Xserve, but I do not have a Mini Display Port Adapter at hand, so this is currently no option. It seems to work with an external FW drive running OS X 10.5.7 (Client) which has the RAID Utility on it...

Raid card and scratch disk setup for FCP

Hi Guys
Can anybody tell me what is the correct way to set up a raid card and scratch disk for FCP if you have 3 x 2TB internal hard drives, with the OS on HD1 and drives 2 and 3 dedicated for FCP
Also with this i also have all my documents i.e work stuff, invoices, pictures, music ect from my old windows PC and used to have them stored on HD2 with the Windows 7 OS on HD1 - i have been told that it is fine if i put this on the same drives as FCP is this correct...?
i only ask this as i have been told how to do it in different ways by 3 people......

Thanks John, although i'm rather embarrassed to admit that I am a complete newbie when it comes to technical/computer hardware terms (i.e. I have no idea about different types of disks, other than a HDD and a SSD, or even what the difference is between your media cache and a scratch disk).
This means that after reading all the links you so helpfully provided hasn't done much other than making me feel even more stupid!
The best that I can conclude from what I think that i've understood is that I will use:
Intel 530 Series 120GB SSD for O/S, Programs (and Pagefile?? No idea what this is, sorry)
Samsung 840BW 500GB - Scratch Disk (is this the media cache?) and preview
Seagate Barracuda 3TB HDD - media, projects, and exports
Please tell me if i've got something around the wrong way....
Thanks again.

Installed a RAID card in my Dell Inspiron 3847. However, the RAID BIOS does not show up and I cannot install Windows 7 to it.

That is basically a summary of the problem The Dell Inspiron 3847 does not come with RAID, so I tried installing a PCI-express 1x RAID card. However, the RAID BIOS never shows up. The HDDs show up when I install the RAID controller driver in Windows 7 setup, but I cannot install Windows 7. I am using an IOCrest SY-PEX40008 RAID card with a Silicon Image Sil3124 chipset.
I tried pressing the hotkeys for the RAID BIOS listed in the card's manual, but it seems to just cause bootup to freeze. BIOS also does not seem to detect the RAID card HDDs as boot options.

%AppData% is the name of an environment variable.
On XP that variable points to C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\
"Application Data" in XP/Win2K and "AppData" in Vista/Windows 7 are hidden folders, use %APPDATA% in the File name field
See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Show_hidden_files_and_folders
You can use Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory > Open Containing folder
See also [[Using the Troubleshooting Information page]]

Adding a RAID card to help speed up export (and other drive question) in Premiere Pro CC

First of all, I have read Tweakers Page exporting section because that is where my primary concern is. First my questions, then background and my current and proposed configurations:
Question 1: Will adding a hardware RAID controller, such as an LSI MegaRAID remove enough burden from the CPU managing parity on my software RAID 5 that the CPU will jump for joy and export faster?
Question 2: If true to above, then compare thoughts on adding more smaller SSDs for either a one volume RAID 0 or smaller two volume RAID 0 to complement existing HDD RAID 5. That is, I'm thinking of buying four Samsung 850 Pro 128 GB SSDs to put in a four disk volume to handle everything (media/projects, media cache, previews, exports), or split it up into two volumes of two disks each and split the duties, or keep the four disk volume idea and put the previews & exports on my HDD RAID 5 array.
The 850's are rated at SEQ read/write: 550/470 MB/s thus I could get around 2000/1500 MB/s read write in a four disk RAID 0 or 1/2 that if I split into two volumes to minimize volumes from reading/writing at the same time, if that really matters with these SSDs?
The Tweaker's page made a few comments. One is splitting duties among different disks, rather than a large efficient RAID may actually slow things down. Since the SSDs are much faster than a single HDD, I'm thinking that is no longer accurate, thus I'm leaning toward the Four disk configuration putting OS & Programs on C drive, Media & Projects on D (HDD RAID 5), Pagefile & Media Cache on SSD (2-disk RAID 0) and Previews &Exports on 2nd SSD RAID 0 (or combine the two RAID 0's and their duties).
Just trying to get a perspective here, since I haven't purchased anything yet. Any experience/stories, I would appreciate.
My current drive configuration:
My D drive is software RAID 5 consisting of four 1 TB Western Digital RE4 (RED) 7200 RPM HDDs with a CrystalDiskMark SEQ Read/Write of 339/252 MB/s.
The C drive is SSD 500 GB (Samsung 840 (not Pro) and does 531/330 MB/s. My OS, Program Files and Page File are on C, and data/media files/project, etc all are on the RAID drive.
Problem:
Current setup allows for smooth editing, only the exporting seems slow, often taking between two and two and a half times the video length to export. Thus a 10 minute video takes 20-30 minutes to export. 15 minute video can take 30-40 minutes to export. The first 10% of the two-pass export takes under a minute (seems fast), but it gets slower where the final 10 or 20% can hang for many minutes like my system is running out of steam. So where is the waste?
I have enabled hardware acceleration (did the GPU hack since my GPU isn't listed) and it may spike at 25% usage a few times and eat up 600 MB of VRAM (I have 2 GB of VRAM), otherwise it is idle the whole export. The CPU may spike at 50% but it doesn't seem overly busy either.
Our timeline is simple with two video streams and two audio streams (a little music and mostly voice) with simple transitions (jump cuts or cross dissolves). We sometimes fast color correct, so that might use the GPU? Also, since we film in 1080 60P and export 1080 29.97 frames/sec, I think that is scaling and uses the GPU. I know without the GPU, it does take a lot longer. I have ruled out buying a faster GPU since it doesn't appear to be breaking a sweat. I just need to know if my system is bottlenecked at the hard drive level because I'm using software RAID and my disks are slow and will hardware RAID significantly reduce the CPU load so it can export faster.
Our files are not huge in nature. Most our clips are several MBs each. Total project files are between 5 GBs and 10 GBs for each video with Windows Media File export being 500 MB to 1.2 GB on average. We shoot using Panasonic camcorders so the original files are AVCHD, I believe (.MTS files?).
Considerations:
1. I'm thinking of buying (and future proofing) an LSI Logic MegaRAID 9361-8i that is 12Gb/s SAS and SATA (because some current SSDs can exceed the 6Gb/s standard).
2. I'm not replacing my current RAID 5 HDDs because not in my budget to upgrade to 6 or more large SSDs. These drives are more important to me for temporary storage because I remove the files once backed up. I don't mind a few inexpensive smaller SSDs if they can make a significant difference for editing and exporting.
I can only guess my HDD RAID is slow but the CPU is burdened with parity. I would imagine running RAID 10 would not help much.
My setup:
my setup:
CPU - i7-3930K CPU @4.5 GHz
RAM - G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3 2133 @2000
Motherboard - ASUS P9X79 WS LGA 2011
GPU - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 OC 2GB (performed the compatibility list hack to enable hardware acceleration).
C drive - 500 GB Samsung 840 SSD (Windows 7 Pro 64 bit and programs).
D drive - four 1 TB WD RE4 Enterprise HDDs 7200 RPMs in software RAID 5
Case - Cooler Master HAF X
CPU Fan - Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO with 120 mm fan
Power Supply - Corsair Pro Series AX 850 Watt 80 Plus Gold
Optical Drive - Pioneer BDR - 208DBK
thanks in advance,
Eric

........software RAID 5 off the motherboard ??????......NOT a good idea, from what I have read here on this forum from experts like Harm Millard and others. They have mentioned a LARGE overhead on the CPU doing this....causing sub-par performance. RAID 0 off the motherboard will NOT do this, however.....RAID 0 would provide optimum speed, but, with the risk of total data loss if ANY drive fails. You may wish to reconfigure your RAID to be RAID 0...BUT...you would need to DILIGENTLY back up its entire volume onto perhaps a quality 4TB drive very frequently.
A lot depends on the nature of your current and FUTURE codecs you plan to edit. You may not want to sink a lot of money into an older setup that may have trouble with more demanding future codecs. For now, in the 1080p realm, your rig should be OK....the read/write performance on your CURRENT RAID 5 setup is not great, and a definite drag on the performance. The rest of your components appear to be fine.....the Samsung SSD, though not ideal, is OK.....it's write speed is WAY lower than the Pro model,but, the drive is used mainly for reading operations. Since you have Windows 7 Pro, and NOT Windows 8.......you CAN put the entire windows page file onto the RAID 0 you might create.....this will take that frequent read/write load OFF the SSD. Read the "tweakers Page" to see how to best TUNE your machine. To use your current setup most efficiently, without investing much money, you would :a. create the RAID 0 off the motherboard, ( putting all media and project files on it ) b. install a quality 7200rpm 4TB HDD to serve as a BACKUP of the RAID array. Then, install a Crucial M550 256GB or larger SSD, ( close in performance to Samsung 850 Pro...much cheaper), to put all previews, cache , and media cache files on....AND to use as " global performance cache" for After Effects...if you use that program. Exporting can be done to ANOTHER Crucial M550 for best speed...or, just to the either the FIRST Crucial or, the 4TB drive. Your current GPU will accelerate exports on any video containing scaling and any GPU accelerated effects. Your CPU is STILL important in SERVING the data to and from the GPU AND for decoding and encoding non-GPU handled video....your high CPU clock speed helps performance there ! You may want to check out possibly overclocking your video card, using MSI Afterburner.or, similar free program. Increasing the "memory clock speed" can RAISE performance and cut export times on GPU effects loaded timelines,or, scaling operations. On my laptop, I export 25% faster doing this. With my NEW i7 4700 HQ laptop, I export in the range of your CURRENT machine....about 2 to 3 times the length of the original video. PROPERLY SET UP...your desktop machine should BLOW THIS AWAY !!
Visit the PPBM7 website and test your current setup to possibly identify current bottlenecks,or, performance issues. THEN, RE-TEST it again, after making improvements to your machine to see how it does. Be aware that new codecs are coming (H.265 and HEVC,etc.) which may demand more computer horsepower to edit, as they are even MORE compressed and engineered for "streaming" high quality at a lower bandwidth on the internet. The new Haswell E...with its quad-channel memory, 8 core option, large number of PCI gen. 3 lanes, goes farther in being prepared for 4K and more. Testing by Eric Bowen has shown the newer PPro versions provide MUCH better processing of 4K than older versions.

Has anyone tried 1 terabyte drives with Apple G5 PCI RAID card 1M9699g?

I am planning on setting up RAID 5 on one of my PPC G5 Xservers with an Apple PCI RAID card and 3 Hitachi 1 terabyte HDs. At $180 a drive and a $300 or so for a card this seems like a good setup. Has anyone tried this or have any suggestions.

It worked, for about $860 I now have a 1.8 TB xServer

Mac Pro RAID 0 setup with bootcamp

I'm about to take the plunge and buy a Mac Pro as soon as I get the money (or credit) to. There have been things here and there that have turned me off but I found ways around some concerns, but this one I haven't been able to find.
I am a musician and want to utilize raw power that Mac does so well with. But unfortunately my DAW of choice doesn't support OS X. I hate Vista, I never upgraded, I stayed with XP but have been willing to change to OS X with XP as well, to get the best of both worlds. Then i find my DAW doesn't support XP 64 bit so i am going to have to use Vista 64-bit (bummer).
What I haven't been able to figure out is if it is possible to run a RAID 0 of the windows OS and all its data. The Mac Pro RAID card doesn't support any Windows OS so i am wondering if there is anyway possible to get the Windows OS in RAID, any good hardware or software that will accomplish this. Like if i get the Mac Pro RAID cad, is there a good software or hardware RAID that will allow me to install windows in a RAID 0 configuration?
If its possible I would have no reasons to not move over, but I really need to have my RAID setup in windows since I am using latency sensitive disk streaming programs that need to stream files in the GBs
Also could I just opt out for the Mac Pro Card and get a generic RAID card that supports both Windows and OS X? And if so any recommendations?
Message was edited by: jmoss211

I'm glad you are in the planning stages!
The question I didn't know to ask is always the one that bites the worst.
One of the best options might be the RR 4320
http://www.hptmac.com/US/product.php?_index=50&viewtype=details
http://www.barefeats.com/hard109.html
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Highpoint%20Technologies/RRAID4320/
One of the first Mac Pro RAID and Boot Camp work?
Games, hence the whole gaming graphics area, has and is not high on the list of features, which had been a large reason for people installing Windows on Mac.
I didn't want to see you invest in SAS and not get performance level you want.
StorageReview Performance SCSI/SAS vs VelociRaptor
Here is the card Barefeats felt was the card that Apple has to beat, and points to some of the limitations of SAS on the Mac Pro. http://www.barefeats.com/hard104.html
MacWorld SanFran in a couple weeks is when Apple traditionally would use to announce some of the new products for the next year (Snow, Mac Pro '09, new iMac, etc).
Apple is not very upgradeable. It would cost me more to upgrade the cpu than buy new (though can get a good $$ on my system - in part because it runs the prior version of OS X 10.4 "Tiger". New systems will only run the current/latest OS, you won't be able to run Leopard if a system comes with Snow. The graphic choices and upgrades can be lame. It is almost a closed box.)
I've talked to people that were into audio that used Fibre Channel in part due to low latency, increased queue depth (which is one area SATA has never implemented, 32 vs 256 I/O per sec).
+Forget trying to use the Apple search to find threads, it is 'busted' if I can't find the thread mbean and I had with someone only last week on RAID5/6. I turned to Google to find this thread +
Multi-core compiler optimization is big on Santa Intel's wish list to get into the hands of developers and vendors.
*3 GHz Nehalem outperforms the latest Opteron by a margin as high as 80% and more.*
Intel has apparently allowed HP and Fujitsu-Siemens to break the NDA on the Xeon 5570 processor for PR reasons as both companies have published SAP numbers on a Dual Xeon 5570. The Xeon 5570 is based on the same architecture as the Core i7. It is a 2.93 GHz quad-core CPU with 4 times a 256 KB L2-cache and one huge shared 8 MB L3.
http://anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=532
And AMD just gave Intel a new run for the money.
AnandTech’s Johan de Gelas has taken a look at AMD and Intel quad-socket servers. The quad-socket six-core Intel Xeon X7460 at 2.66 GHz is compared to the quad-socket four-core Shanghai-based Opteron 8384 at 2.7 GHz. And what were the results of a test using VMware’s ESX Server 3.5?
Shanghai’s 16 cores outperformed Dunnington’s 24 cores (or 48 if Hyper-Threading was used) by 6.5% or 8.8% depending on whether or not IBM or Dell’s chipset was used. But if we normalize that out per core, Shanghai outperforms by 59.8% (per core) or 63.2%. That is unbelievable!
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/amd-cleans-up-in-high-end-server-virtualizati on-20081223/

Mac Pro & RAID Card configuration

hello-
i've got a 2 x 2.26 Quad Core Xeon Mac Pro with an Apple RAID card in it
1 x 1TB system drive
and
3 x 2TB media drive for video
question: can i have the system drive separate from the RAID card and just create a 6TB RAID0 array for the media drive?
i've heard that the system drive should be part o the RAID (currently it's its own JBOD RAID, so NOT part of the 6TB array) but I can't see how to do this
any help/advice will be much appreciated.
thanks
david

If you have a RAID card installed and the drives are in their trays, they're all going through the RAID card (for MLB interface purposes). You could have a single drive setup as the sys drive and then the three drive RAID 0 set. The card will support RAIDed and non-RAIDed disks. I currently have a MacPro with a RAID card installed, yet all of the disks are setup with the original OS-based RAID configuration (will be switching soon as the RAID card was just installed). You have plenty of choices and what you're wanting to do is totally doable with or without the RAID card, as it could be done in the OS via Disk Utility.

2010 Mac Pro with Apple RAID card - "Drive carrier 00:03 removed"

I've got a 2010 Mac Pro with the Apple RAID card and 4 internal identical Seagate ST32000641AS 2TB drives inside.
I've never had a problem with the RAID card (either battery or in operation) except for one thing:
Almost every time I shut the machine down (which I try to do as rarely as possible), it keeps losing Drive 3, the spare.
(See RAID Utility event log snippet below.)
[I wish I could understand why this Apple RAID card keeps losing the spare across power-cycles/reboots, but I digress.]
So I just adopted it as the spare and it spawns the rebuild and many hours later, everything's fine again.
... until the last time I rebooted (Jan. 2nd).
After the usual "I lost the spare" message upon login, it began the rebuild.
But this time, about 11 1/2 hours later the rebuild stopped and RAID Utility reported "Drive carrier 00:03 removed".
Bay 3 is now missing in the Controller view.
I powered off the system last night, and left it off overnight. Today I took all the drives out, blew the dust off and reseated them.
Same thing. Drive 3 is still missing, and now the rebuild task aborted.
The drive bay location shouldn't matter, right? Can I swap the Bay 3 drive with the Bay 4 drive?
I figure one of two things would happen:
(1) It will report Bay 3 as being there but Bay 4 as being missing, same situation as is now. Meaning the problem is in the Bay 3 spare drive.
(2) It will report Bay 3 as being missing (despite a 'good' drive being present) and Bay 4 will be the (unattached) spare, and the RAID set will be unviable. Meaning the problem is with the drive bay itself, not whatever drive is plugged into it.
If "Drive carrier removed" is trying to tell me the disk is bad, why do I not see any log messages about it? I suppose a spare that never gets used could go bad from lack of use, but ... no messages at all?
Hesitant to plunk down $160 on a new spare disk if the present one isn't actually dead ...
% sudo raidutil list raidsetinfo
                                     Total     Avail
Raidsets      Type       Drives       Size      Size Comments
RS1           RAID 5     1,2,4      5.23TB    0.00MB Rebuild: 0% complete
% sudo raidutil list driveinfo
Drives Raidset       Size      Flags
Bay #1 RS1             2.00TB   IsMemberOfRAIDSet:RS1 IsReliable
Bay #2 RS1             2.00TB   IsMemberOfRAIDSet:RS1 IsReliable
Bay #4 RS1             2.00TB   IsMemberOfRAIDSet:RS1 IsReliable
Event log snippet:
Saturday, January 11, 2014 8:15:19 AM PT
Background task aborted: Task=Rebuild,Scope=DRVGRP,Group=RS1
informational
Friday, January 3, 2014 3:50:28 AM PT
Drive carrier 00:03 removed
informational
Thursday, January 2, 2014 4:29:37 PM PT
Marked drive in bay 3 as a global spare
informational
Thursday, January 2, 2014 4:29:28 PM PT
Adopted drive in bay 3
informational
Thursday, January 2, 2014 4:28:34 PM PT
Degraded RAID set RS1 - No spare available for rebuild
critical
Saturday, December 7, 2013 5:35:17 PM PT
Marked drive in bay 3 as a global spare
informational
Saturday, December 7, 2013 5:35:08 PM PT
Adopted drive in bay 3
informational
Saturday, December 7, 2013 5:34:11 PM PT
The "RedundancyScrub" command could not be executed. (Invalid request or invalid parameter in the request.)
warning
Saturday, December 7, 2013 5:34:03 PM PT
Degraded RAID set RS1 - No spare available for rebuild
critical
Friday, December 6, 2013 4:56:47 AM PT
Battery finished conditioning
informational
Thursday, December 5, 2013 9:53:44 PM PT
Battery started scheduled conditioning cycle (write cache disabled)
informational
Friday, September 6, 2013 10:53:11 PM PT
Battery finished conditioning
informational
Friday, September 6, 2013 3:41:33 PM PT
Battery started scheduled conditioning cycle (write cache disabled)
informational
Saturday, June 8, 2013 3:41:35 PM PT
Battery finished conditioning
informational
Saturday, June 8, 2013 8:37:49 AM PT
Battery started scheduled conditioning cycle (write cache disabled)
informational
Thursday, May 30, 2013 4:09:51 PM PT
Marked drive in bay 3 as a global spare
informational
Thursday, May 30, 2013 4:09:42 PM PT
Adopted drive in bay 3
informational
Thursday, May 30, 2013 4:08:59 PM PT
Degraded RAID set RS1 - No spare available for rebuild
critical
Thursday, May 30, 2013 3:32:29 PM PT
Degraded RAID set RS1
warning

Power Pig wrote:
"Hesitant to plunk down $160 on a new spare disk if the present one isn't actually dead ...
% sudo raidutil list raidsetinfo
                                     Total     Avail
Raidsets      Type       Drives       Size      Size Comments
RS1           RAID 5     1,2,4      5.23TB    0.00MB Rebuild: 0% complete
I was talking about this.
This looks like a RAID 5 setup without the parity to me. I would said it basically a RAID 0.
Also you metioned "I guess that previous spare must really have gone 'bad', despite having never been used! "
I wiped everything out, I selected the 3 disks and clicked on "Create RAID Set" with RAID5 selected and the "Use unassigned drives as spares" option checked. The 3rd disk has always been marked as the spare ever since then. You do not have a choice to create a "RAID5 setup without the parity". If I wanted a RAID0 I would have chosen a RAID0! raidutil now says
% sudo raidutil list raidsetinfo
                                     Total     Avail
Raidsets      Type       Drives       Size      Size Comments
RS1           RAID 5     1,2,3,4    5.23TB    0.00MB No tasks running
Every time the system would 'lose' Drive 3 on boot, I would just keep rebooting until it was 'found', and then manually re-assign the now-'floating' drive as the spare - and the RAID would rebuild.
There was never a problem until the day that prompted this post - when it would not find Drive 3 no matter what I did. I turned the Mac Pro off for several hours until the drives had all cooled down and it still did not find the drive. I left the machine on but unmounted the degraded volume until I got the new replacement drive.
I really don't understand what you are getting at. It's like you are trying to tell me I set it up as a 4-drive RAID5 with no parity(!) and that I was in grave danger because one of the disks was gone. The actual RAID contents (spread across Drives 1, 2 and 4) were never in danger, unless a 2nd disk had failed while the spare was not seen by the Apple RAID card. I wasn't too worried about that happening.

Can't get RAID Card to work.

I bought a Rosewill RC-200 raid card and can't get windows to instal to it with 2 x 80 gb drives RAID 0. In the BIOS, it doesn't show up in the "Standard CMOS Features" list, which I guess might make sense, but it does show up in the Hard Disk Boot Priority list. It lists 2 hard drives, SCSI-1: MAXTOR 6B080P0 AND SCSI-0: WDC WD800JB-00CRA1, and "Bootable Add-in Cards. If I boot to the Windows CD, neither of the drives or the RAID show up. I booted with and without the RAID 0 setup and no drives were available to install to. How can I get windows installed on this RAID?
Thanks
Joe McDaniel
System specs:
K8N Neo4 mobo w/ AMD 4600+

Quote from: Joe Mac on 02-September-07, 18:03:10
Now here is the problem I am faced with. When I boot, it says "Disk Boot Failure insert system disk and press enter". If I insert the install cd it will boot Windows normally. If I boot without the CD it gives me the error. Any thoughts? I have XP installed on the RAID card. I have the boot sequence setup as Hard drive then CD and the Boot disk priority to the SCSI-0 Sil Striped Set <PM> first. Is there some other BIOS bit I'm missing?
Thanks
Joe Mac
It looks like that there is not active partition on the drive.
boot from XP CD, then go to recovery console.
use "fixmbr" to re-write MBR on the HDD.
then apply active partition with "diskpart"
type:
diskpart [ENTER]
select disk 0 [ENTER]
list partition [ENTER] /* locate your bootable parition and remember his number, usually its 1st listed, also "Type" of it listed should be "Primary" */
select partition 1 [ENTER]
active [ENTER]
exit [ENTER]
reboot PC, to reflect changes.

Typical read/write speeds for Apple Raid card

I have 3 1TB Samsung F3 Spinpoint drives that I am using in Bays 2-4, coupled with Apple's Raid card. Before striping the drives in a raid configuration, I used Disk Utility to write zeroes to each of the disks individually, which took about 3 hours each (this works out to about 100 MB/s, which makes sense to me). However, the third drive, in Bay 2, took much longer than normal to zero (over 12 hours), so I suspected a defective drive. When I striped them using the Raid Utility program, I was able to create a volume and proceeded to test it using QuickBench. Extended Read tests in the 20-100 MB range were only about 30 MB/s. Is this normal? Shortly thereafter, my Raid Utility program encountered an error with the hard drive in Bay 4, which wasn't the same disk I had problems formatting. I took out that drive, removed the volume and raid, and set up Raid Stripe 0 with 2 disks. I am still encountering Extended Reads of about 30 MB/s, no matter if I have cache enabled or not. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

I suppose I could select a block size other than 32 kB when I set up the raid, but I wanted to save time to see if any posters have other suggestions.
I know that the windows version of the drive makers utilities are recommended for surface scanning and mapping.
In the case of weak sectors, this is about all you can do.
I may be wrong, but I think Apple has a clause in their manual so that people will buy hard drives from them instead of 3rd party manufacturers.
I am sure that is part of it.
There is also the onboard ROM of the hard drive.
Problem with Apple supplied cards of any kind, is that they have a history of ROM manipulation.
Whether it be crippling (as compared to 3rd party equivalent), or keys to limit performance or compatibility, it is always a question.
I know I am not the only one who has bought their own hard drives for a Mac Pro RAID setup.
I'm sure you are not, and was just "crossing t's and dotting i's" in asking....
BTW, I have 132 MB/s Read, 121 MB/s Write for 2MB-10MB blocks, avg 128 MB/s and 110 MB/s for 10MB-100MB blocks on a 2 drive RAID with WD drives in a 100MHz FSB system.

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

K7N2G-ILSR: How to boot from SATA when a raid card is installed

The situation:
1. I have a separate raid controller (Silicon chip) with 2 drives on raid 0.
2. I have another drive (my boot drive) that I want to place on the onboard Promise SATA raid controller.
The problem:
The bios doesn't include an option to specifically boot from SATA, only SCSI. So when I place my boot drive to the onboard Promise SATA raid controller, the system won't boot because it's looking for system files on the raid 0 drive.
Is there a workaround for this?

Well, all my drives are IDE. I did try the SATA RAID using lumberjacker's bios but it isn't stable.
Aside from 3 IDE drives, I also have 2 atapi drives (cdr-w, dvd).
Here's my current setup:
ide 0 - boot drive (master), DVD (slave)
ide 1 - cdr-w (master)
onboard ide (sata controller) - (vacant)
SATA 1 - (vacant)
SATA 2 - (vacant)
promise raid card (2 ide ports)- 2 hard drives on raid 0 (both as master)
What I really want to do is place my boot drive on the SATA port (using a pata to sata converter), or on the onboard promise parallel port. So that it can have it's own port.

Help with installing Arch x64 to Silicon Image SiI 0680 raid card

I am having one heck of a time trying to find information on installing Arch on a Silicon Image SiI 0680 raid card. I have searched both the wiki and the forums and I cannot find any information about this card. I am trying to install a raid 0 setup on Arch x64 Could someone point me in the right direction, any help is appreciated. Thank you.
Information about the card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a … 6816132004

My memory has slipped a bit: the following is more to the point than my reference to md=0!
Member
Registered: 2009-09-02
Posts: 17
E-mail
Re: [SOLVED] usb /boot, RAID5 /root, mkinitcpio.conf help request
The array stabalized and I was able to reboot with the following entry in my menu.lst:
# (0) Arch Linux
title Arch Linux
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/md0 ro
initrd /kernel26.img
$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md2 : active raid5 sdi1[0] sdg1[3] sdh1[2] sdk1[1]
2197715712 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
md1 : active raid5 sda3[0] sdf3[5] sde3[4] sdc3[3] sdd3[2] sdb3[1]
7252222400 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU]
md0 : active raid5 sda2[0] sde2[5] sdf2[4] sdd2[3] sdc2[2] sdb2[1]
52451840 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU]
Thank you very much to everyone in this thread. I really appreciate the help.
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CalDigit's RAID Card or Highpoint's RocketRaid 4322

hi Everyone,
Are we having fun now or what eh? Congrats to Apple on it's Nehalem MacPro release! While a test of our patience, the wait was a fine process full of joyous anticipation!
I'll be placing my order shortly, and have decided that the 8-core 2.93ghz with Radeon's 4870 is the one for me. My primary softwares, 3D CAD (Vectorworks) and a rendering program (Artlantis) that I use for making concept presentations, are processor intensive. Moving up from my long serving PowerMac G5 is going to be quite the thrill, but I need some help please. It's about hard drive controller cards...
Six months ago, after doing my due diligence in the RAID research department, the CalDigit RAID Card was the front runner. Now, having read recent reviews, it looks as though I should purchase Highpoint's RocketRaid 4322 card. Price-wise, the Caldigit's $100 less expensive plus there's a $100 rebate deal on 'til the end of April ( http://www.caldigit.com/news/CalDigitVRShippingPR.pdf ) making it actually $200 less than the 4322.
Not that money's no object, (far from it actually!) but, when it comes to this kind of decision, I don't let price hold too much weight. Quality pays and, in this case, what I want to purchase is the best hard drive controller card for my purposes and for this machine,
so...
Which card should I buy? Speed and stability/dependability are the primary goals.
Setup-wise, my plan, at this point, is to run WD Velociraptor 150GB drives in the first two bays. These two drives would be set on RAID 0. On this set, I will install the OS, all my applications, and a few primary data files. In the third and fourth drive bays, I will be installing two Velociraptor 300GB drives also set up as a two-drive RAID 0 set. On this set, I will keep all of my data files.
I think this will be a good way to go. I have three external drives that I use for backup and I occasionally burn discs of my data files (which I'll happily be able to do onto Blu-ray discs using the second optical drive bay's soon to be installed Blu-ray RW drive. Yummy!). Thanks to all the backup, and having an eDrive, I comfortable having everything on RAID 0. Running this G5 on a similar configuration has been fantastic. No problems and great, great speed, especially for this, a nearing five-year-old computer.
I'd appreciate everyone's thoughts here. Which RAID card will you buy or have you bought?
Oh, and just what's the difference between Highpoint's 4322 and their 4320? Reading through the specs at the Highpoint website was entirely unhelpful!
I look forward to hearing from you.
thanks in advance,
yours,
JimQ,
Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada

Maybe this is why Highpoint's two top cards are getting more light on them?
Hi,
From my view, using the Mac Pro internal bays with any 3rd party RAID card is a disaster waiting to happen. Anytime Apple makes a change in the hardware or the OS it can easily cause the card to no longer be able to be installed or work properly. In addition, it is possible that some System updates may not like to be installed on RAID boot volumes and I bet the new Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X will break most current 3rd party RAID drivers.
When the boot system is used with an internal 3rd party RAID driver the possibility of a problem occurring when integrating a Mac OS X update rises exponentially. Having the internal Mac Pro drive bays connected to the motherboard gives the user a fighting chance
The reason I was never excited about the CalDigit RAID card is that it uses a slow, entry level, Intel RAID processor. Even with 16 hard disks connected the card is limited to less than 500MB/sec. In addition, it does not support SAS. The slow processor keeps the performance down even though the HDs can provide much higher performance. A 16 channel card with a slow processor is like a sports car with a 4 cylinder 70 horse power engine. It just doesn't make sense to me.
In contrast, the HighPoint RR 4322 includes the high powered Intel IOP 348 1.2GHz (1200MHz) processor with embedded SAS functionality. This card provides two mini-SAS ports (8-channels) that can provide almost twice the performance with eight hard disks in RAID 0. Using RAID 0, AMUG recorded 801MB/sec write and 748MB/sec read performance with the RR 4322. With a RAID 5 configuration 665MB/sec. performance was recorded. With RAID 6, 580MB/sec. was available. The HighPoint RR 4322 provides amazing performance and SAS compatibility. If performance is important, there is no contest between these two cards.
You can read more on the RR 4322 here:
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/highpoint/4322/
The RR 4322 also supports SAS expanders. This allows the HighPoint card to support up to 128 disks with the use of SAS expanders. AMUG tested the Enhance RS16 JS SAS expander enclosure with the RR 4322 and was able to achieve amazing performance with 16 hard disks. Even RAID 6 provided performance as high as 746MB/sec. write and 894MB/sec. read.
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/enhance/rs16js/
Using an external RAID with the RR 4322 provides great performance when needed and the ability to turn the RAID off when not required. Being able to turn off the RAID when not needed saves energy and provides for longer RAID disk life.
If you do find a system conflict with a Mac OS X update it is much easier to boot up from that backup disk that was created before the update than if the RAID is the internal boot disk
The HighPoint RR 4320 is the internal version of the RR 4322. While it is a great deal at newegg for $329, I would always prefer the external version given a choice. Especially since it sounds like Apple may have altered the internal Mac Pro SATA bay connections.
Have fun!

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