Mac Pro issue

[jjlphoto]

FWIW, my OS is on a pair of Leopard RAID-0 drives mounted in the lower optical bay and I have the drives in the 4 main bays all running in RAID-0 via Leopard, thin outer 4x30G (120G total) scratch, the larger inner partition for storing working image files.  In benchmark tests my machine is a screamer.

 

Jack-  do you mean that in a MacPro tower you can put in more than the four drives in those ez install drive bays? Do you need another card?
(Sorry about hijiacking the thread.....   )

[Jack Flesher]

Jack-  do you mean that in a MacPro tower you can put in more than the four drives in those ez install drive bays? Do you need another card?
(Sorry about hijiacking the thread.....   )

Hi JJ:

Yes, you can put 6 drives in the Mac Pro tower without adding a card, but only IF you have only 1 optical drive in place.  You can even get 8 drives total inside the Mac Pro tower, but you need to add a card for that and no optical drives.  To do so, I use this drive cage and mount my pair of OS drives in the place of the lower optical bay -- works very well: http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cf...;Product_ID=158

Cheers,

[jjj]

Yes, you can put 6 drives in the Mac Pro tower without adding a card, but only IF you have only 1 optical drive in place.  You can even get 8 drives total inside the Mac Pro tower, but you need to add a card for that and no optical drives.  To do so, I use this drive cage and mount my pair of OS drives in the place of the lower optical bay -- works very well: http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cf...;Product_ID=158

I took the optical drive out and simply placed two HDs in situ, with some padding/foam. The end result a much quieter machine with two more HDs as the DVD writer make a real racket. If I want to use the optical Drive I simply plug it in via USB and oddly it is much quieter now too, despite being outside - obviously a resonation problem. Threading the cables through and onto the spare sata ports is a real pain however. It is made much easier if you strip away the hard plastic at the end you plugin to the mainboard - this gives you more flexiblity and space. You can easily take the fan out to make job possible.

I use a Highpoint 2134 eSATA card for my RAID/Ext HDs, a lot cheaper than theApple version and it works!  

[Jack Flesher]

I used normal SATA cables and they plugged right into the main board easily and without modification?  I did remove the fan assembly to make that easier.  FWIW my DVD drive makes zero noise until you run it, and I don't run it much.  But yes, if I wanted to add 2 more drives I would moe the optical drive into a usb box in a nano-second.

[BernardLanguillier]

Bernard,

I for one would be interested in hearing results between the same series of tests done via your hardware RAID and the exact same set-up done with Leopard's RAID...

Cheers,

As of now this card is a total disaster. Even after having left the MAc Pro on for 72 hours in a row, I am still getting error messages saying that the battery is not fully charged, or just died.

I am also seeing a very important degradation of my overall system performance....

Real mad at Apple on this one, this is the worst purchase I think I ever did.

Cheers,
Bernard

[dandeliondigital]

Bernard,
Sounds like there is something wrong. Did you call APPLE TECH support? I would. Your troubles shouldn't be happening.

We have two of these RAID systems that have been on since we got them and not a problem.

We do sometimes get notifications, but the Apple Utility program main screen list (log of events) usually shows that they have fixed themselves. You do need to manually make the notifications go "green" by clicking the "Clear" button on the far right in the RAID Utility. This window's width is fixed so you have to scroll to the right to see it. There is a column entitled "Clear" on the far right hand side. I moved it to the left, next to "Time" column so that I could see it without scrolling.

I'd call Apple about this woe.

Good luck, and so long for now, TOM

As of now this card is a total disaster. Even after having left the MAc Pro on for 72 hours in a row, I am still getting error messages saying that the battery is not fully charged, or just died.

I am also seeing a very important degradation of my overall system performance....

Real mad at Apple on this one, this is the worst purchase I think I ever did.

Cheers,
Bernard

[Jack Flesher]

As of now this card is a total disaster. Even after having left the MAc Pro on for 72 hours in a row, I am still getting error messages saying that the battery is not fully charged, or just died.

I am also seeing a very important degradation of my overall system performance....

Real mad at Apple on this one, this is the worst purchase I think I ever did.

Cheers,
Bernard

Bernard,

Sorry to hear this, but it actually echo's what my other friends have seen with that card...  Good news is that Leopard RAID-1 and RAID-0 both work very well; better than soft-raid I think, but perhaps not as glitzy.  If you have not given it a try, I suggest you do.  

Cheers,

[Dustbak]

I have read several times people that had similar issues. They had to charge the battery for days before it became fully charged. In the mean-time performance was horrible. After the battery fully filled the performance also turned to something you should expect. Funny part is that others never ran into this and reported charging didn't take longer than 24hours.

At set times the charge in the batteries is refreshed (every 3 months if I am not mistaken). I have not heard back from those that had to charge for an extremely long time how that went.  Some people went with 3rd party Raid cards. Maybe you should wait even longer for the charging. One suggestion I read was not to built the RAID until the battery was completely charged to prevent paying the performance penalty.

Your adventure did bolster my decision not to do RAID5 but built a larger stripe set and have an external backup unit. Perfomance is my main goal and a stripe set of the same amount of disks normally does outperform a RAID5 config.

[JeffVo]

I've had the Apple Pro Raid Card in my 2008 Machine since it came out last Feb.  For the most part its been trouble free.  It is somewhat sensitive to needing to be plugged in and on for the battery to be charged.  It will however run with the battery dead just slightly slower. I dont think there is an easier solution. Plug it in and the software is already built into leopard. There are other raid cards out there and undoubtedly many are faster (my 4 drive set-up is around 250mbsec Raid 5), but do any have support like apple?  I went with the apple solution for piece of mind.  The Apple Raid software is simple and always guaranteed to work (will third party drivers work when system gets updated?) Further,  I can bring it to any Apple store for repair.  Even though I have a solid back-up scheme my data is more important than outright speed.  I've had many machines and invariably they go down at some point.  Bring a broken machine to  Apple and the first thing they ask, 'Do you have any third party Ram or cards".  Do you think they are gonna help you when a third party Raid card causes trouble?  I've been down that road with one of My G5's that I stuffed a bunch of drives in....

[BernardLanguillier]

My Raid card is going back to Apple... the money will be used in a Pioneer Blue Ray double layer writer.

Cheers,
Bernard