[2009059]

Hi everyone,

I currently have three 500gb drives in my mac pro set up as a RAID 0 set through disk utility. I'm ready to upgrade to a hardware RAID, because the software RAID isn't cutting it... What are my options for RAID cards? I'd like to stay away from apple's ridiculously priced ones and am basically looking for the student budget version . Could you please recommend any cards that you know of or have used that are reasonably priced and work well!?

Thanks a lot!!

[mduell]

CalDigit has a card for about half the price.

[SierraDragon]

http://barefeats.com/hard109.html reviews the Highpoint RocketRAID 4320.

-Allen Wicks

[Samanoske]

Honestly, sorry to post to a thread that old but for the record: AVOID Highpoint Rocket RAID cards. Their customer is the worst of the worst, their cards do not all support OS X booting, i.e. no EFI support and they do not support the sleep mode. I have bought one but I gave up and now have bought a Areca Raid Controller ARC 1212, worth every penny!

AVOID RocketRaid!!!

[rehoot]

Depending on how many drives you are going to get, you might want to consider 5 or 6 hard drives in your current computer and keeping the software RAID. This thing can help you use the extra port:

http://www.sonicstate.com/news/2007/...-on-a-mac-pro/

Rocket Raid and other bargain RAID cards can work well for some purposes, but they still use a fair amount of computer resources. I really good card has its own CPU and memory on board--it's basically a full computer on a card. If you buy an external box and put 10 drives in it, then a good card is worth the money. If you are going to buy an expensive card and use it on 3 drives, you are wasting your money.

[OreoCookie]

First of all, what do you mean by `not cutting it'? Are you dissatisfied with the performance? It's probably cheaper to get new, fast harddrives instead of a RAID card.

BTW, Apple's RAID card supports SAS drives.

[cgc]

Would a RAID card allow using the existing hard drive bays in a Mac Pro or would the drives need to be installed and connected directly to the RAID card?

[mduell]

Originally Posted by cgc 

Would a RAID card allow using the existing hard drive bays in a Mac Pro or would the drives need to be installed and connected directly to the RAID card?

With the existing bays; this is standard for workstation-grade hardware.

[2009059]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie 

First of all, what do you mean by `not cutting it'? Are you dissatisfied with the performance? It's probably cheaper to get new, fast harddrives instead of a RAID card.

BTW, Apple's RAID card supports SAS drives.

Yes I meant that the performance was underwhelming. It seems that there is very little change from a non-RAID configuration in terms of speed. I might invest in a pair of raptors or SAS drives, but was hoping there was a cheaper alternative.

[OreoCookie]

Could it be you've configured your two drives as a JBOD instead of a RAID0? Although Apple's software RAID isn't a speed demon, it still is significantly faster than a single harddrive in terms of throughput. Another thing could be that your typical application scenarios don't benefit from a RAID0 (e. g. if you deal with many small files). Blindly pouring money into something is rarely the optimal solution.

[2009059]

I have it configured as RAID 0, not JBOD. It is in 64K blocks so that should be good for all-round use, correct?

[OreoCookie]

No, what I said has nothing to do with block size (although that influences performance, too). If your applications are such that most of the time, the harddrives seek, then you will not see much of an improvement, because seek times are not sped up at all by RAID0. As a matter of fact, they are even slightly (not appreciably, but slightly) slower, because the computer has to wait that extra nano second until both heads are positioned to where they should be.

Block size doesn't change that much, although longer blocks are worse for more fragmented, shorter data, because the heads spend longer times `reading nothing interesting.'

All in all, depending on what you do, you could see improvements with one single drive with faster access times or a RAID0 if what you do needs large transfer rates. A RAID0 is not the be-all-end-all solution.

[SierraDragon]

Originally Posted by 2009059 

...I currently have three 500gb drives in my mac pro set up as a RAID 0 set through disk utility. I'm ready to upgrade to a hardware RAID, because the software RAID isn't cutting it...

Before we can further comment we need to know

• What exactly are your hard drives setups including how full, what types of arrays, what lives on what drives, what connectivity, etc.?

• What apps and workflow are not cutting it?

-Allen Wicks

[2009059]

Originally Posted by SierraDragon 

Before we can further comment we need to know

• What exactly are your hard drives setups including how full, what types of arrays, what lives on what drives, what connectivity, etc.?

• What apps and workflow are not cutting it?

-Allen Wicks

3x500 in RAID 0, totalling 1.4 TB with about 700GB free. This is home to applications, the files I work on, and scratch. Then I have a 320 with disk images and a 750 with finished movies and pictures. All five are internal (the 320 is in the 2nd optical bay hooked up to the extra SATA port and the optical drive power cable).

Usually when I am rendering files, either video, sound or pictures, the system monitor will show about half CPU usage, half RAM (I have 10 gigs...) but full throttle drive usage. This is the main reason for me wanting to upgrade, because of this being such a noticeable bottleneck.


Thanks

[Bwa]

I have a pair of RAID-0 2 TB WD external FW800 drives on my Mac Pro. I am using software RAID-1 over the pair.

Even with the software RAID-1, they are noticeably faster than a single drive. My internal drives are all RAID-1 so I can't comment on RAID-0 performance comparison.

But what's cool about the WD 2 TB drives is that they are cheap-- $250/ea on Amazon. (These are two 1 TB drives in a single chassis and lame "management" software.)

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by 2009059 

3x500 in RAID 0, totalling 1.4 TB with about 700GB free. This is home to applications, the files I work on, and scratch. Then I have a 320 with disk images and a 750 with finished movies and pictures. All five are internal (the 320 is in the 2nd optical bay hooked up to the extra SATA port and the optical drive power cable).

It's obvious why: you put everything on one `fast' volume instead of having separate drives. Think of it this way: you have two fast drives and you create two RAID0 volumes. Then you copy from one volume to another some big files. It will be slow.

Then you dedicate one drive to a volume. You'll find that copying a big file from one volume to another will be very zippy.

Why? In the first scenario, although the throughput is significantly higher, your heads will spend most of their time seeking. In the second scenario, they won't have to seek at all and you can use the full bandwidth a single drive gives you.

If there is a lot of disk usage, then this may explain why your drives may be the bottle neck (something to be checked). Putting a RAID controller under these circumstances will give you no performance advantage whatsoever.

[2009059]

Thanks OreoCookie! I'm a little unclear though in your first few sentences...two drives into two RAID0 volumes? Can you suggest a new configuration for me using my existing drives?

Thank you very much!

[OreoCookie]

I'm saying that your system could be faster if you break up the RAID0 altogether or partially. Put your scratch drive on a dedicated disk, for instance.

Regarding the first sentence, you create two RAID0 volumes that span the same two drives (you cut the disk space in half for each RAID0 volume).