Mac Pro :: How To Run 4 1.5TB SATA Drives In A RAID 5 Or 10
Jan 18, 2009
The time has come to move to a RAID setup in my Mac Pro. Ideally I'd like to run 4 1.5TB SATA drives in a RAID 5 or 10. It seems there are a LOT of threads on this topic all filled with different information, so I have a few questions...
Which RAID cards are bootable?
Do any work like the Apple card and interface with the drives through the logic board?
If not, how do you connect the internal drives to the RAID card in their stock bay locations?
ive put 4 of the hitachi 1tbs in my new mac pro.. and i really want to do Raid on them eventually.. and buy the pricey apple raid card.. i'll do it.. but speed wise:
How fast is a Sata connection straight from HD>Motherboard... ~75mb/s? Is the Raid 5 config with all those drives much faster... around ~110mb/s?
Do you know if there is anyway to get a 5th drive into the raid 5 array? using the ODD space.. or some externals too... i need as much as space as possible...
And boot camp wont work with raid card anymore? I was thinking to have the startup disc be a raptor to increase speed on the apps, how would it integrate with the raid card, etc
Is it possible to get a highpoint raid controller and put those 4 drives in a raid 5 array (and then create partitions inside that array) - or do you need to have 1 drive by itself for the operating system, and then create a raid array using the remaining 3 drives?
Lastly, are the highpoint 3500 series a decent card? and fully compatible?
I am using the first generation Mac Pro, and I wanted to ask some questions related to SATA HDD and The Raid configuration. I currently have 4 HDDs in the internal bay and 2 external in the enclosure using the USB2 connection. The performance is not that great, and I am sick of adding more HDDs through USB2 which offers really slow performance. I was thinking of building a dedicated NFS File Server using Linux, but before I did that, I wanted to ask if there are solutions out there within Apple Mac Pro without going through this route.
I currently have 6 and probably need to buy 3 more in very short time period. also, all of my HDDs are 750g. Simply put, I am wondering if there are like 16 or 24 port SATA Raid Controller that I can buy for MacPro. Since the MacPro can't house all of them inside, I need to use external enclosures for some of these HDDs, connected through eSATA or whatever means possible without jeopardizing the performance. I am also interested in Raid 5 setup, so, that support in raid card is mandatory.
I see Seagate & WD have announced these but I'm struggling to find many available to order. Only the WD Green one appears to be even offered as an internal option. What is more it is more expensive buying the internal drive than buying the external USB one.
Has anyone bought one of these externals and stripped out the drive to put in their Mac Pro? I'm running out of space on my 1.5TB and swopping to 2TB hardly seems enough.
I'm a graphic designer but I don't know much about my computer's inner workings. I have a mirrored drive door dual 1Ghz G4. I have two SATA drives that were used in a Dell server on a RAID setup. They are Western Digital Caviar HDs, 250 GB apiece.
My question is: is there any way to install one of these drives in my computer?
I know some SATA II drives can be jumpered to be SATA I compatible. Would they be reliable in this application? I have an iMac G5 and I'd like to upgrade the internal HD.
Just wanted to confirm that the Seagate Sata 2 hard drives are compatible with the MacPro4,1 Quad-Core Intel Xeon. I'm looking to buy two Sata 2 drives. One drive as a data backup on the mac side, and one to backup Windows 7 (accessed with Bootcamp and Parallels 5) on the windows side.
Is it possible to install 4 SATA drives into a G5 tower? I didn't open it up yet cause I have to move so much material to get to it. I'm assuming you can purchased a SATA PCI card but is there room in the case for 2 additional drives?
I have two drives in my Quicksilver 2002 G4, one is a 250GB which can be fully used, the other an 80GB. Can U rid both of these drives and install two SATA 1.5TB drives? I do not want to use the PCI slots for a SCSI card and wire additional drives that way, because the transfer speed will be limited to 40mbps I believe. I have a Sonnet card a dual PPC 1,8Ghz card, a PCI USB 2.0 card and have other open PCI slots, but finally ran out of storage, and have a use for this machine to hold a LOT more. Other than the transfer speeds possible on SATA, are there any other differences between the original IDE (ATA) drives? Do they connect the same way?
I have used an optical caddy to fit a SSD into my macbook pro along with the existing 500GB hard drive. My next ambition is to fit 2 hard drives and a SSD inside the macbook pro. My questions are:
1) Can I use a Sata port doubler (Do they exist?) to run 2 hard drives through one sata port. (The bandwidth is there) 2) Failing the above can I use a cable linking a sata drive to the airport express slot? (is it PCI express?)
1) Does Bootcamp properly support Vista 64-bit ? If so how stable is it (don't want any crashes caused by poor drivers - really want rock solid stability under Vista) ?
2) Will the Mac Pro support any SATA hard drive or would I have to buy specific models/brands ?
I want to know if there is a way to connect sata 2.5 hd's to the sata connections in the mac pro. I cannot seem to find the cables to be able to do this. Can someone help with a link? I have several 250gb sata drives that have been taken out of mbp's and would like to put them to work.
I have looked and found several ways to access the ports, but have been stuck at finding the cable.
I just got a brand new MAC PRO desktop. It came with a 600GB HDD. I purchased a second identical internal 600GB HDD. I wanted to do setup a RAID 1 using these 2 drives. Currently the main drive has the OS and all my other apps installed. I installed the 2nd drive and was fooling with disk utility. I'm not sure how to set this up however. I tried numerous guides online but I just cant figure it out.
MAC PRO (takes up to 4 internal drives) - currently installed 2 identical drives Leopard Using Disk utility
The RAID tab says "online" and the status is green (indicating the RAID is working). However on my desktop i see the 2nd hardddrive mounted with no contents in it. I just want to able to use the 2nd drive as a mirror so this way if one fails I'm still up and running.
I just got the apple mac pro raid card today, but after I connect it and all 4 SAS drives, the MAC OSX Installtion program can not detect the SAS at all, I open the RAID Utility but no dirve there, the battery is in charging status.
I currently have a 2TB WD mirror edition that is setup in RAID 1 so it will mirror all my data. Now I also have a bunch of other drives laying around which I also feel the need to back up and currently I am doing this by doing a whole bunch of dragging and dropping and copying and pasting etc etc etc and this is making me very tired. I know that a setup is possible in disk utility but I am not at all sure about how to configure it so I wont lose any of my data.
Some details about my setup: Mac OS X 10.5.6 PowerPc G5 Harddrives: two 1TB WD MyBooks, and two 500gig WD Mybooks --> these pairs need to mirror each other and make my life less of a hassle.
I'm about to configure my 2006 MP with one of Apple's RAID cards using RAID5. I currently have 4x 750GB drives that I can use, but I can see needing more space in the not too distant future. When I do need more space, can I simply drop in a 2TB drive, let the RAID system reconfigure itself, and repeat this until I have all 4 drives in place? Is there a better or different way to do this? I know that if one of the drives is larger than the others, then only a drive space equivalent to the smaller drives will be used in RAID5. After addition of the fourth drive (per the above scheme), will the array then use the full 2TB of each drive?
So I have a Mac Pro with Bay 1 acting as my regular start up drive. I also have three other Western Digital 500GB hard drives that I have been using as a RAID backup system. However, when I place all three of the RAID hard drives into Bays 2, 3, and 4, the computer will not boot. It never reaches the Apple logo, and continually tries to restart. So I figured one of the hard drives was corrupt.
However, I have tested all three hard drives in Bay 2 and the computer will boot just fine. I have also tested each bay individually (i.e. the same RAID hard drive in each of the Bays seperately) and the computer still boots fine. I can even power up with any two hard drives in Bays 2 and 3. The only time I can't power up is when all three of the hard drives are occupying all three of the extra bays.
Also, none of the RAID hard drives show up in Disk Utility or on the desktop. Shouldn't I be able to view them as normal internal or external hard drives being plugged into my Mac? They do show up in RAID Utility. Is this normal with RAID hard drives, or should they always show up in Disk Utility?
I created a new RAID backup with two of the drives together (Bays 2 and 3) and it recognizes it in System profiler. However, I want to be able to use all three drives for the RAID.
I have a 8-core MP 2.8Ghz with 10gb ram and Ati 2600HD. I'll someday replace the ATI with a quadro (all my application is 3d/CAD/Design) I'm installing 4 of the WD640 drives, they arrive on Friday.
I would love to order the CalDigit RAID card but after searching I finally figured out it's not available until next month.
That said, I need my system to start working ASAP and I don't want to wait if I don't have to.
I'm a designer, I need fast scratch so some striping needs to be involved. I also need data protection. At this capacity Time Machine isn't going to be of any use and I'd prefer redundancy anyway.
The 4 WD640s are replacing: 1 750gb 7200.11, 2 WD SE16 500GBs, and 1 320GB (Apple Stock Drive).
I would like to sell some of those drives to defray the cost of this endeavor but I'm open to keeping 1 or possibly 2 as external drives or stuffing one into the optical bay with a converter.
I want speed and reliability, of course! But really the largest motivator here is the combined drive aspect. Having so many volumes is driving me nuts.
My intention had been RAID 5 or 6 but I now know that Apple Software RAID can't do this. So now it seems with software RAID 0+1 would be the only option.
Realistically, does the cpu performance degradation outweight the speed gained from striping the drives? It's so difficult to determine bottlenecks.
Any thoughts on my best bet without/before the RAID card arrives. Can I migrate the array after installing the card without data loss?
If I just JBOD the drives can the concatenated set be broken up ever? I was thinking I could JBOD until the card came.
Anyone know if it's possible to attach two USB hard drives to a Time Capsule via a USB hub, and configure them in a RAID1 configuration and use them as my Time Machine backup disk? I would then use the TCs internal drive as network storage.
I have a bunch of Mac Computers here and I want to make a file server for them with about 5 drives in an RAID array to be a little bit secure. I am fairly certain how to go about and build myself a basic file server for a bunch of PCs networked together, but I am not sure about how to do it for a network of Macs.
