Xserve G5 RAID question

Can you use the Xserve G5 PCI RAID controller and the Xserve RAID Fibre Channel controller in the same Xserve? Thanks in advance.

Yes.
The XServe has two PCI slots. The RAID card must be installed in the lower slot, but that leaves the upper slot available for the fiber channel card.
Note, though, that when running with two PCI cards installed, the PCI bus runs at 100MHz, not 133Mhz, potentially degrading throughput. Whether or not the difference is noticeable will depend on your usage pattern.

Similar Messages

Newbie FCP HDV monitoring and RAID questions

Hello forum gods.
First off, I must confess - I am a defector seeking assylum in the the Mac camp. I am a born-and-bred Windows person, and a longtime Avid editor who just made the jump and purchased the Mac-Pro with all the bells and whistles, and FCP Studio. I did this to accompany my JVC ProHD cam and deck.
I have no idea what I am going to do with the time I used to spend scanning for viruses and trojans. I am thinking I may write a novel, or build a house by hand - but that is another topic.
Now that the confession is out of the way - we can move on to the actual questions.
<big breath>
Ok - so I have this new fancy shiny computer, deck, camera, and monitors - one of which is the Sony 23" that is comparable to the Apple 23. I do not have a Kona or Blackmagic card because I was told that I did not need one right away - though I do plan on getting one later. For monitoring, I was going to use the firewire in/out of the JVC deck and convert the signal via the component outs to another HD monitor. This would bring the total monitors on the system to 3 - a 19" for the edit screen, the 23" for the video playback in FCP and the braodacast HD for monitoring the final signal.
Is this workable?
Now for the second question - storage and RAID.
Most of my footage will be either SD or HDV. Eventually I'll be going to XDCam, but that's a bit down the road. I have the internal 250 gigger that came in the Mac, and I purchased additional 500gb SATA II drives that I was going to use to set up a RAID. Should I do this internal or external? Will it work? What else do I need? What is the meaning of life?
Thanks for your replies. My credit card is anxiously awaiting your suggestions
G5 Quad Mac OS X (10.4.8)
G5 Quad Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Some question back atcha:
1) When you say you'll be working in SD, what do you
mean? Typically, SD refers to uncompressed 601, 720 X
486. Or are you referring to DV NTSC?
DV NTSC and/or the myriad formats that the JVC100 can do.
2) Your Profile says you have a Quad G5, but your
post says it's a MacPro. Which is it?
Sorry - Consider that my first public gaffe in the new Mac world. I bought the Mac Pro. Time to change my profile. I bought it last week - it isn't even here yet. Supposed to be delivered today...
3) Are you wanting to see your HDV sequence on a
external video monitor while you're editing? If so,
you'll need the Kona card (or the Blackmagic card,
but I don't do BMD, only Aja, so I don't know about
the Blackmagic offerings.)
I've read about the Cinema Preview function and although I know that this isn't the best idea for monitoring, wouldn't it work? On the JVC deck, it has the firewire output/input and component outs (among others) so in E-to-E mode, couldn't the deck act as my converter for monitoring on the broadcast monitor? If not - I have a line on a Kona-2 with the BOB for about $1400. Deal or no deal?
Now as for your RAID question, you can do either
internal or external. Just don't include the drive
that contains your system folder in the RAID.
I was planning on using the 250 for all my system files and the 2-500 giggers as my edit drives. Sound good?
EDIT: As for the meaning of life, go ask your father.
Gaah... He handed me "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and told me to get to reading....
Thanks for the help. Lord knows I need it.

Xserve disks and RAID questions

I have an Intel Xserve with its two original 750 GB disks. These are configured as RAID 1 (mirror).
I intend to purchase an identical disk as a hot spare and upgrade two old G4s with four each of the same disks as reserve web servers/backup.
The original disks are Seagate ST3750640NS which I can buy for £140 although the Apple price is £386 including the disk carrier. Apple refuses to sell the disk carriers separately.
The PCI boards I have found are:
http://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/sata1v4.html
and
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/temposatax4i.html
costing $120 and $200 respectively.
There are PC boards as cheap as $20 but these may have bootability and compatibility issues. There appears to be little information about the proportion of hard/soft RAID resulting from any of these boards.
My questions are:
1 - Is there an inexpensive way of buying disk carriers for recent Xserves?
2 - Are there alternative satisfactory PCI boards?
3 - Do such boards differ much in terms of RAID types supported?
4 - Do such boards differ much in terms of the degree to which they are host computer independent? - ie more hard than soft and hence, presumably, faster.

>1 - Is there an inexpensive way of buying disk carriers for recent Xserves?
I'm not aware of any sources other than Apple (at least that I'd trust).
>2 - Are there alternative satisfactory PCI boards?
There are several manufacturers who make PCI RAID cards that you can use. You've listed two, but there are others including the RocketRAID series, and those from ACard.
>3 - Do such boards differ much in terms of RAID types supported?
In my opinion, you get what you pay for.
Cheap cards may support RAID 0 and 1, while more expensive cards may add RAID 5. This may or may not be important for you if you're just mirroring.
There are going to be performance differences between each card. Since you're using G4's, though, you're going to have other bottlenecks, so disk speed isn't likely to be a big factor.
>4 - Do such boards differ much in terms of the degree to which they are host computer independent? - ie more hard than soft and hence, presumably, faster.
If you get a card that works in a Mac, it's likely to also work in other hardware. The same can not necessarily be said the other way around - cheap PC-centric cards may not support Macs, mostly because of driver issues.
Note that you may also have issues with booting - not all cards can create bootable volumes which may leave you out in the cold if you don't check that first.

Intel Xserve With Raid card Remote install Question

I am currently trying to remotely install OSX server on an Intel 2008 Xserve with a newly fitted raid card (Apple) I get as far as choosing which HD to install but none of the drives show? (there are all Apple brand 300GB SAS)
Can I only install it locally on the machine if a Raid card/SAS drives are in there??
Thanks

Hi,
I just started to do the same. Did you find a solution?
Thanks,
Hans

Best option for initial setup of HD's on Xserve (possible RAID)

I'm just about to set up a new network in a new office and have an Xserve with 3 HD's 2x700GB and 1x500GB drive.
Now i have a fair bit of experience with the server itself, however i have zero experience with RAID.
I would like to start automatic backups of the OS (which i do already in a round about way). And have several share points for users network homes and data.
Does anyone have any suggestions of how to setup the HD's themselves, should i RAID? what would be the best option? etc etc etc.
All suggestions are very welcome and appreciated.
Thanks
Steven

No one can answer your question - at least not without more information.
When deciding disk layout you need to factor things like how much usable disk space you need - in this case for users' data. Are the users home directories on the server, or do they just upload files to the server for storage/backup?
What's the intensity of the data? Is reliability or performance more important? Would you pull your hair out if you lost a single file? a day's work? a week's work?
How much downtime could you tolerate if the server crashed?
These questions (and probably more) are important because it helps focus on the needs. For example, if the integrity of the data is more important than uptime you could mirror the two 700 GB drives for the user data and install the OS on the single 1TB drive. Of course this leaves you (slightly) vulnerable to a problem on the OS disk and you could be offline for hours if that disk failed. However, your user data would be mirrored and likely protected from disk failure.
On the other hand, if the uptime of the server is more important, you might opt to install the OS on the 700GB mirror, using the 1TB for user data, relying on backups to restore this disk if it fails.
Or, you might decide to put everything (OS and data) on the 700GB mirror, using the 1TB as the backup destination.
On the other hand you might determine that you need 1TB of user storage space, in which case you either need to use the 1TB for user data, or you need to stripe the two 700GB drives into a 1.4TB array, but then that array has no redundancy and the loss of a single disk will result in the loss of all data.
So, as I said, there is no one single answer to your question. You'll need to balance storage capacity and redundancy to find the best match for you.

G5 Xserve Harware RAID controller - do all drives have to be connected?

Hi,
I am installing a hardware RAID controller into a G5 Xserve. The machine has three drives in it - one 80 GB drive module that has just the operating system installed on it, and two 500 GB drive modules that are currently configured as a RAID 1 array via software. I am aware that I have to reformat the drives after installing the RAID controller, and I have taken appropriate steps for backing the data up. My question, however, is if I will have to attach all three drives to the RAID controller, or whether I can leave the 80 GB module separate (the preferred configuration). Thanks.

Watch out for the firmware bug on the Apple Hardware RAID - doesn't always fully flush write caches on graceful power down (disconnects from the drives before the caches are fully flushed). I turned in a RADAR bug report in November 2005 (RADAR # 4350243), still open. It was a very difficult bug to pin down and create a reproducible test case - causes mystery garbage blocks from space, especially hard to get reproducible results because of the way RAID 5 works on reads. LSI Logic fixed this bug after Apple's code split from the LSI firmware code (the Apple Hardware RAID card is a rebranded LSI Logic megaraid card with Apple firmware), but it seems unlikely that Apple will ever fix this bug because the Xserve G5 and Apple Hardware RAID card are both EOL.
Only known workaround of which I am aware is to disable write cache on all LUNs.
Russ
Xserve G5 2.0 GHz 2 GB RAM Mac OS X (10.4.8) Apple Hardware RAID, ATTO UL4D, Exabyte VXA-2 1x10 1u

X-Raid question about adding more drives

Hi Guys.
I am running an X Server (10.3.8 dual 2GHZ PPC G5)with an X-Raid attached. Right now it is only half full with a RAID5 volume that is my main file server.
My question is can i add three 500GB drives into the empty slots of my X-Raid and congiure them as another RAID5 volume without killing my current drives setup on the X-Raid?
Thanks for any help.

You can do it hot. The 3 drives you insert will not affect the exiting RAID set in any way whatsoever. The Xserve RAID supports up to 3 RAID sets per RAID controller (each controller handles one "half" of the array -- so 7 drives). What you're doing is very common.
The only thing I say is that you need to be sure you replace the 3 unused "blanks" and don't accidentally eject one of the drives that's already part of a RAID set. This should be pretty obvious as the "live" drives have blue and green lights, and the blanks have none, but other than that, it's a cakewalk.

New Xserve & Old RAID

Hello Everyone,
We just bought a new Xserve to use with our existing Xserve RAID.
The new Xserve will replace our existing G4 Xserve which is running 10.3.5. We use our current Xserve for Windows & NFS file sharing.
My question: Can I just plug in the existing Xserve RAID into the new Xserve and will it just automatically mount? I understand I will need to recreate the shares and transfer accounts, etc. I just don't want the Xserve RAID to get wiped out by plugging it into a different Xserve.
Any advice or tips is appreciated. Thanks!

Yes, you can just plug it in -- assuming you used the default OS X file system of HFS+.

Xserve and FibreChannel question

Hi,
i need to setup some xserve for a video producer for a massive video editing.
this is my stuff:
1 (one) Xserve G5 dual 2.3GHz 1GB ram 1FibreChannel pcix
2 (two) XserveRaid , the first with 14HD 400GB (5.6TB) the second 14 HD 500GB (7TB)
my question is this:
is it possible to link to a fibre channel two XserverRaid?
Is there a loss of power or something else?
How can setup them to have some advantages in video composing/editing?
thank you!

The Xserve RAID has 2 fibre channel ports, and they are independent. So each Xserve RAID requires a dual-port HBA to connect. You can connect 2 Xserve RAIDs to a single Xserve, if you put 2 fibre channel cards in the Xserve. This will take both PCI slots, so you won't be able to use a video card in this case (so hopefully you have ARD).

Upgrading Xserve with RAID set

Hi,
I have been asked to upgrade a copy of Server 10.3 to 10.4. I don't like upgrading, so will do a clean install and then restore all of the SA and WGM data back into the server. Here is the question:
The XServe has 3 bays - bay 1 has the startup disk and bay 2 and 3 have a mirrored RAID set. Is the RAID config data held in the OS, so if I reinstall the system will the configuration data for the RAID set be lost and will I have to re-RAID the server? Or is the config data stored on the drive and so a re-install won't affect the RAID set?
Many thanks,
JS
iMac G5 17" 2 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, 600 GB HDD Mac OS X (10.4.9)
iMac G5 17" 2 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, 600 GB HDD Mac OS X (10.4.9)
iMac G5 17" 2 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, 600 GB HDD Mac OS X (10.4.9)

I would like to know if the RAID 'config' data is
actually written onto the drive or is stored in the
OS. I first thought it would be stored in software
because Disk Utility uses software RAID, but then
again a single drive has the partition data on the
drive.
James,
If you think about it a bit, software RAID information has to be on the drive because the volume becomes a RAID before a filesystem is created and before an install is done. Likewise, a hardware raid is done on the interface card and comes up the same way. Neither can know which of the members of the mirror are available at first boot; otherwise, there would be a single point of failure during boot, and the whole purpose of a RAID 1 mirror would be lost.
The bootstrap starts on the mirror primary, then, as the driver is brought online and before any writes are done, the driver collects the members of the RAID 1 mirror set and forms the mirror. If the mirror primary isn't available, then the mirror secondary is used (which has an exact copy except for stuff indicating that it is the secondary). All this happens normally during boot, as if from a single non-RAID drive, until the cutover is made to RAID early in the driver intialization.
That's why booting from a RAID 0 (stripe) is so hard - all of the data is not present on a single drive. It can be done, but it is hard and requires special care during the boot.
You really do want to make the upgrade to AppleRAID 2 before spending time on the update, though. There are details in this article on afp548.com:
http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=AppleRAID2-in-Depth
Russ
Xserve G5 2.0 GHz 2 GB RAM Mac OS X (10.4.8) Apple Hardware RAID, ATTO UL4D, Exabyte VXA-2 1x10 1u

Xserve setup/backup question

I'm planning to get an Xserve, together with the Promise VTrak E-Class storage system (4 TB, single controller). For backup, I am thinking of getting some LTO tape drive with an auto-loader that goes into the same rack.
My question is how to combine these pieces. It seems that tape drives with firewire interface are disappearing from the market. Given that I have a fibre channel card, would it make sense to use a fibre channel tape drive then? I was planning to use the dual-channel fibre channel card to connect to the VTrak system. As this system has only one controller, can I use the second fibre channel port to connect to the tape drive? Or would I need a quad-channel fibre channel card, given that at some point I might upgrade the VTrak system with a second controller and more storage?
Many thanks for any recommendation.

SDLT and LTO and Ultrium tape drives and particularly tape loaders are commonly deployed in the enterprise product space, and the usual connections in that market are SCSI and SAS for local direct connections, and FC SAN for typical server connections.
Various sites also use big, slow (and thus cheap) disk used for some archival processing, as well; depending on the value of the data, these configurations are usually RAID and with copies located across multiple sites. But I digress.
The tape hardware itself is generally available. The "fun" with using tape drives (of any sort) with Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server is acquiring and maintaining the driver and host software; of getting the data out to the tape drive and (hopefully) back in again as needed. This also obviously involves upgrades and related tasks, as well as how you can perform the recovery of your archives. And this software tends to be specific to the controller and the tape drive and (if you're using one) the loader.
I don't see the SCSI card in the Xserve configuration screens or in the US Apple store.
There are third-party options. If you go this route, a package of controller and hardware and related software is a better idea; a configuration that somebody has tested. ATTO Technology is one of the established vendors here, though there are others.

Power Mac G4 RAID Question

After successfully putting OS X Leopard on my Power Mac G4, I then gasped at the amount of space I had; from the built in 10 GB hard drive, I had a couple hundred MegaBytes left. However, I recently pulled a 40 GB Hard Drive from another computer, and installed it. The Mac had no problem identifying and formatting it.
However, having very little space and more things to install, my question is this; How do I set up this Mac to identify the 2 internal drives as one single drive? I have done a little research, and discovered Disk Utility's ability to configure a sort of "Software RAID," but cannot find a good guide as to define how to actually do so. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance,
Jordan. Meow!

OK, you're not going to get much speed out of OSX with only 50 GB to start with, since Leopard does best with 100 GB or 30% Free space, but anyway, boot from the Install Disc...
1. Insert the Mac OS X Install disc, then restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
*Important: Do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must restart from the disc again to access Disk Utility.*
Select one of the drives, click on the RAID tab, Raid type select Concatenated RAID set, drag to two drives on the left to the window on the right, iirc.

RAID question

We currently have our 10g database connected to our storage array (RAID10). We're going to upgrade our servers to 64-bit machines, and in the process the physical DBA wants to start storing our data on the local drive system (RAID5).
There is sufficient space on the new server, and it's easily upgradable if our growth estimates are incorrect. The general consensus here is that in the case of disk failure, a modern RAID5 system no longer takes an unnacceptable amount of time to rebuild a disk.
As the logical DBA, I am concerned about changes, especially when I don't fully understand the technology. Is there anything I should be worried about, or good questions I could ask in order to insure that we get the same performance level and availability? My knowledge of RAID is purely theoretical, and comes from articles I've accessed on the web.
Thanks
-cf

the first thing comes to my mind is your primary concern will be write speed impact on your system.
RAID 5 have superior disk read rate but moderate to low write rate because of the parity generation.
RAID 10 have over all better IO rates.
It's also interesting to know there're definitition between Physical and Logical DBA somewhere. :)

RAID questions

I have a couple of questions on Raid. According to Danny, ICH5R is not hardware raid. This question was risen in my last post "Help creating partitions in RAID 0 volume", because it seems Partiton Magic only works with hardware raid. Also, I got the impression that a RAID 0 volume can only be created in a Dynamic Disk. However, Windows disk manager shows my Raid 0 volume as being a Basic disk. I'm confused. My questions:
- Does software in general recognize my Raid setup as being software raid (ICH5R)?
- Is it true that there is little gain in speed with software raid?
- Why does my raid volume show up as being a basic disk?
- How much does it cost a TRUE hardare raid controller? Any decisive advantages over my mobo's ICH5R?
- As anyone used Partion Magic for partitoning Raid volumes using software raid?
I've been serching the web for answers but I've found more contradictions than answers Any help is appreciated. Thanks

I can't answer all your questions but here's a start.
Theoretically, the ICH5R has twice the bandwidth of the PCI bus so should be faster. In practice, most people with FIS2R boards have found the Promise controller a little quicker. It seemed a little faster for me as well but it wasn't a huge difference and I suspect it depends on what you're using it for. As for hardware/software issues, I don't know. I do know that I got hard drive performance increases of between 30 and 70% on both Raid controllers compared to a single drive depending on which benchmark program I used and the type of test. I also found that Partition Magic 8 seems to function properly using the boot floppy with either the Intel or Promise Raid controller. I also use Drive Image 7 which comes with a boot CD and it works with both Raids as well. I have learned the hard way not to use any features where you make changes in Windows and the program then boots automatically into DOS to make changes and then boots into Windows again. If the program is not completely compatible with the 865/875 chipset(I doubt any can promise that yet), it will hang in Dos mode and you're stuck with a Dos partition at the beginning of your C drive. So I like to boot these programs from a floppy/CD.
I'm not satisfied yet that the Raid0 config is really stable so I have WinXP installed on a single SATA in the Intel controller and a Raid0 array on the Promise controller for all my media/Games. I also put my pagefile on the Raid. This allows me to load game levels/movies/large images etc... quickly and keep my OS a little safer. After Windows loads, it doesn't access the XP drive much anyway with 1GB of memory. Then I just periodically save important media/game saves on the XP drive or CD and use drive image to save the OS on the Raid drive.
Hope that helps answer some of your questions.

Xserve / internal RAID card / Battery Failed (code 0x#0 = 18)

Hi, RAID utility is reporting a battery problem. I have rebooted xserve once, the problem went away, the battery was charged but now I have the problem again.
The result is a disabled write cache, which reduces performance.
Changing the battery is quite a big effort, so I really would like to avoid this. Any ideas, what the problem might be and how to solve it?

Hi Lordlobby,
I've had this on 2, 2008 xserves. Started off randomly happening that the RAID card would report the same error code which wasn't down to the discharge cycle. It became worse so the battery was replaced and it's been fine since... It's about 15mins work to replace the battery..
Good luck
Beatle

Xserve G5 RAID question

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