[superfula]

I've been looking around for a card that can do RAID 5 with esata ports and at least three internal sata ports. My goal is to RAID three internal drives with a couple external. So far all I have found is a card that has two and two. Has anyone come across such a card? If not, I'm open to other suggestions.

I'm using a current setup to house my movies and music, but it will soon max out what I have. RAID 5 and a couple esata ports will give me the flexibility to add drives down the road

[mduell]

Buy the Apple RAID card and a $5 bracket to make the two extra internal SATA ports into eSATA ports.

[superfula]

I looked at the Mac Pro Raid card and it's just too much money, which is why I'm looking for a 3rd party solution. Sonnet made a card with 4 internal and 4 external. Unfortunately it's been discontinued.

[bencurtis]

You want to create one large RAID-5 volume out of three internal drives and other external drives? Doesn't sound like a good idea to me - as soon as external drives are switched off, or got disconnected accidentally, the volume would break and you'd have a nasty mess. Unless you mean creating one raid-5 volume internally and a separate one eternally, which would make more sense. Sorry I don't know about which cards to get though.....

[headhoncho1]

I agree with bencurtis about accidentally switching off a set of drives when using internal and external. Will cause a bad crash of data.

However, Highpoint Technologies makes great RAID cards and they constantly upgrade the software to coincide with OSX releases. They have very good Mac support to boot

You probably will need the RocketRaid 2322 which has 4 ports SATA/SAS internal and 4 ports external.

I have a 6 raid drive set in my MacPro. I use the 2320 model which has all 8 ports internal.
In order to fit all 6 drives, I utilize the 4 internal bays PLUS the lower Optical drive bay. However, in order to get the internal bays to connect to the PCI card (normally, the hard drives connect directly onto the MacPro motherboard which means you can't attach an SATA cable to connect to the 2320 card) , I use the MaxConnect SATA link (only $89 for this). You can search on Ebay to get used pricing on the 2322 which pops up often. I bought mine for $180 which was a pull off another system. This card although over $400 new, rarely goes over $200 on Ebay.

Max Connect - www.maxupgrades.com"
HighPoint - www.highpoint-tech.com"