What Is Raid Card For Mac Pro

What Is Raid Card For Mac Pro Catalina
Raid Card For Mac Pro
What Is Raid Card For Mac Pro Max
Best Raid For Mac
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I was not aware that Apple had ever produced a RAID card for the Mac Pro until today. And at the same time I learned how relatively useless this once-costly card is.

The Mac Pro is a series of workstations and servers for professionals designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Inc. The Mac Pro, in most configurations and in terms of speed and performance, is the most powerful computer that Apple offers. It is one of four desktop computers in the current Macintosh lineup, sitting above the consumer Mac Mini and iMac, and alongside the all-in-one. Mac Pro 2006 and 2007 have a SATA II 3.0 Gb/sec. (300 MB/sec.) controller. Throughput with my SSD RAID 0 is 800 MB/sec. Total via all devices plugged into the 4 controllers in the system. Most SSDs bench out at 240-250 MB/s for single SSDs on Mac Pro 1,1 or 2,1. How does this compare to all other bootable methods of storage on the Mac Pro 1,1/2,1? Mac Pro RAID cards. Picked up an additional two 2010 mac pros. They both have raid cards that need the battery replaced. Are these useful at all or are they pretty much garbage? Save hide report. This thread is archived. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast.

The RAID card supports up to 4 SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) and/or 3 Gbps SATA Rev. 2 drives. It must be plugged into the top PCEe slot, which is marked 4x/RAID.

There were two versions of the Mac Pro RAID Card. The first one was designed specifically for the original 2006 Mac Pro, the 2007 8-core revision to it, and the Early 2008 model. It retailed for $999. The original card requires Mac OS X 10.4.10 or later and an iPass cable.

On the plus side, because of the iPass cable (built into 2009 and later models), you don’t have to run multiple cables to your Mac Pro’s hard drives. On the minus side, the original card does not support sleep mode.

2009 Mac Pro RAID Card

The 2009 version of the Mac Pro RAID Card is compatible with all Mac Pro models from 2009 through 2012. It requires Mac OS X 10.5.6 Leopard or later with the Early 2009 Mac Pro, 10.6.4 Snow Leopard with the Mid 2010 Mac Pro, and 10.7.3 Lion with the Mid 2012 model. Retail price was a more affordable $699.

One unusual feature of the Mac Pro RAID Card is a rechargeable battery that keeps the 512 KB write buffer alive and supplies power to the SATA or SAS drives should the Mac Pro ever lose power. But if the battery is dead, the buffer is worthless. In fact, unless the battery is fully charged, the buffer is disabled – charging the battery can take up to 12 hours! (According to Bare Feats, the 2009 version of the card allows full-speed writes while the battery is charging. Unlike the earlier RAID card, the 2009 one also supports sleep.)

Further, when Bare Feats benchmarked the Mac Pro RAID Card, it discovered that the tested alternatives were all faster than Apple’s $700 card.

Considerations

What Is Raid Card For Mac Pro Catalina

If you really want to improve your Mac Pro’s performance with SATA drives, invest in a 6 Gbps SATA Rev. 3 PCIe controller. Other World Computing recommended the Highpoint RocketRAID 2721 card, but it is no longer in production.

Raid Card For Mac Pro

The sad truth is that the software RAID available in the Mac’s Disk Utility program creates a faster SATA RAID system than this hardware solution. If you want to use SAS drives, it might make some sense, but not for SATA.

And if you want to use Boot Camp, forget about it. Boot Camp does not allow for installing Windows on hardware or software RAID drives.

Further, if the battery is shot and will no longer fully charge, the write buffer won’t do a thing for you. If you do want to use one of these cards, be forewarned that a replacement battery will cost more than the used RAID card.

Finally, make sure that your Mac Pro and the RAID Card both have the latest firmware installed, as this improves reporting battery status and compatibility with Mac OS X.

You Must Understand This

Member drives must be the same size. If any drives in the RAID 0 array are larger than the smallest drive, all the drives will be formatted to the same capacity as the smallest drive for the duration of the RAID 0 array’s operation.
Use a backup drive, in case one of the main RAID 0 member drives fail (unless you’re okay with the risk). RAID 0 does not include any fault tolerance or redundancy, so the failure of a single drive will take down the entire array.
- RAID 1 creates a mirror, so if either drive fails, the other one can take its place immediately. The benefit is data security. There is no speed benefit.
- RAID 2-5 divide data across three of more drives a use parity so that if a single drive fails, the data on the remaining drives can be used to duplicate that data that was on the bad drive. If another drive should fail during this process, all is lost. Restoration is a long, slow process. Because the non-parity data is on at least two drives, there is some speed benefit over a single drive, but the overhead of calculating parity and writing it can create a bit of a slowdown – which is way beyond the scope of this article.
- RAID 6 uses doubly distributed parity, so that even if two drives fail at the same time, all data can be restored. Restoration is a long, slow process.

Setting Up

This wonderful article will point you in the right direction, I’m merely documenting the results here. If any article which helps on setting up RAID0 in Mac OS gets deleted as a point of reference, I’ll write one, just comment below or contact me if you can!

Some Things to Note

Mac Pro 2006 and 2007 have a SATA II 3.0 Gb/sec. (300 MB/sec.) controller.
Throughput with my SSD RAID 0 is 800 MB/sec. total via all devices plugged into the 4 controllers in the system.
Most SSDs bench out at 240-250 MB/s for single SSDs on Mac Pro 1,1 or 2,1.

How does this compare to all other bootable methods of storage on the Mac Pro 1,1/2,1?

What Is Raid Card For Mac Pro Max

You decide. Here’s a list below of all the different styles and options available to you, as a Mac Pro 2006/2007 user.

1 (Slowest): 3 TB WD Green 5400 RPM hard drive, SATA II. All Mac Pros shipped standard with either a 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM hard drive. This is what you get: 92 MB/sec. writes and 94 MB/sec. reads.

2 (Sluggish): Two 7200 RPM hard drives in RAID 0. This is a tad bit better than a single hard drive. Things load up noticeably faster, and boot times are better. It’s not as good as a single SSD, but if you have two identically sized drives, go bananas. Notice how the speed is literally doubled over a single hard drive: 189 MB/sec. writes and 198 MB/sec. reads.

3 (Fast): Single SSD. Not the fastest, but we’re starting to get somewhere. With overhead in the SATA II port, as well as other drives being connected to the same SATA II controller chip, using up some of the 800 MB/sec. memory bandwidth, this particular computer can’t benefit from a RAID 0 array. Boot times are noticeably faster, apps launch faster than we remember, and the computer in general feels like an entirely different machine, as an SSD doesn’t have a spinning platter to read data off of. 250 MB/sec. is enough to load up all startup programs in seconds after logging in.

239 MB/sec. writes (80% of SATA II maximum) are 2.6x as fast as the 5400 RPM drive, 1.26x as fast as the 7200 RPM RAID 0 array. 253 MB/sec. reads (83% of SATA II maximum) are 2.68x as fast as the 5400 RPM drive, 1.28x as fast as the 7200 RPM RAID 0 array.

4 (Faster): Two SSDs via SATA II in RAID 0. We’re now definitely past the SATA II barrier, but not quite into SATA III territory (6.0 Gb/sec. or 600 MB/sec.). Apps launch faster than ever thought possible on a machine of this age, boot times are within 15 seconds after the boot chime, web browsing is a pinch, and basic operations fly like on a brand new Mac. When coupled with a well supported, decent GPU, this config makes any old Mac Pro buttery smooth, like a new Mac. Literally, like a new Mac, try it out sometime.

463 MB/sec. writes are 54% faster than a single SATA II connection and 77% as fast as the top throughput of SATA III. 492 MB/sec. reads are 64% faster than a single SATA II connection and 82% as fast as SATA III supports. Writes and reads are both 94% faster than with a single SSD.

5: (Very, Very Fast): Four SSDs in RAID 0 via SATA II. This is SATA II?!? It almost feels like this thing was made way after SATA II was introduced, and the numbers reflect this feeling, too. As a matter of fact, this RAID 0 array is so good that it basically moved this Mac Pro’s native boot volume speed up a notch to faster than SATA III specs – not even the 2012 Mac Pro has this kind of native SATA controller speed/revision.

Everything snaps in an instant, at the tips of my fingers, no questions asked. There is not even the slightest, most mild delay doing anything anymore. All startup programs load all at once. Anything I launch can launch in succession with 20+ apps opening at once. Launching all the apps at once from my dock takes maybe 10 seconds, tops. This is impressive to watch, my friends are “wowed”, and this is all happening on a 2007 Mac Pro.

Writes are 607 MB/sec., just a bit beyond the SATA III specification and 31% faster than the two SSD array. Reads are 549 MB/sec., 91.5% of the SATA III maximum and 11.7% faster than the two SSD array.

Publisher’s note: The law of diminishing returns has kicked in here. Assuming that each SSD is on a separate SATA II bus, the theoretical maximum is 12 TB/sec. Although the author didn’t test a three SSD RAID 0 array, it probably would have had similar results to the four SSD setup. Maybe something for a future test.

Conclusion

This is the fastest documented native boot volume configuration in my own Mac Pro. The only one that can beat this would be a 6x SSD RAID 0 array, but the law of diminishing returns prevents me from pushing that far.

2006 and 2007 Mac Pros can use PCIe SSDs but will be forced to view them as 1x PCIe v1.1, so throughput is limited to 200 MB/sec. (Yes, that’s slower than SATA II.)

This 2007 Mac Pro feels comparably as fast as, if not faster than, a 6-core 2009 Mac Pro. By this I mean by relative degree of performance and usage, based on user perception.

Best Raid For Mac

Many drives and storage experiments later, I learned to really bring the most out of this Mac Pro, no questions asked. The storage is usually the weakest “speed” link in a computer, which can drag down the performance of a computer. This is most certainly not the case in my Mac Pro.

keywords: #raid0 #ssdarray

Imac Pro Graphics Card

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