I have just received and installed the MacPro RAID card and here are my first impressions:
Installation:
Pretty straightforward, but required removal of memory, video card, all disc drives and some sheet metal. I was surprised to find that the disassembly differed based on a four core or eight core machine. Apple seems to be designing each machine as a one-off.
The reason for most of this disassembly was to get to the connector on the motherboard that attaches a cable going to the drive connectors. Besides disconnecting this cable from the motherboard and attaching it to the RAID card, the process involved re-routing this cable to provide the reach necessary to get to the connector on the RAID card. This was a bit of a PITA and seemed impossible until I removed and re-installed the connector for drive 1 so as to route the cable to the right of the connector. Note that this move is not in the manual.
After the hardware assembly, I installed four Hitachi 500 Gig drives which are currently $110.00 each from newegg.
My RAID configuration is a single three disc raid 5 RAID set with the fourth drive configured as a hot spare.
I formatted the raid set as a single volume. The RAID card took about five hours to construct the raid set and another couple of hours to fully change the on-card backup battery.
After restoring from one or my previously made backups (using the disc utility). I was up and running.
Performance:
This is pretty impressive, especially when the file fits in the RAID's on-board buffers. Photoshop opens in three seconds. I am using this configuration mainly for reliability, and it is pretty nifty that reliability and speed arrive together. You could go faster by striping all of the drives, but nearly double is fine for me given I am now protected from disc failure. Smallish files read very rapidly, due to some predictive buffering I think. Largish files (of the one gig size or so) read at about double speed.
Is it worth the money?
$1000.00 is a lot, but I think of it as data insurance.
Other considerations:
I am continuing to use Leopard's time machine as well as an occasional external backup.
All of my really important stuff gets backed up off site via usb drive or the internet.
-bob
Installation:
Pretty straightforward, but required removal of memory, video card, all disc drives and some sheet metal. I was surprised to find that the disassembly differed based on a four core or eight core machine. Apple seems to be designing each machine as a one-off.
The reason for most of this disassembly was to get to the connector on the motherboard that attaches a cable going to the drive connectors. Besides disconnecting this cable from the motherboard and attaching it to the RAID card, the process involved re-routing this cable to provide the reach necessary to get to the connector on the RAID card. This was a bit of a PITA and seemed impossible until I removed and re-installed the connector for drive 1 so as to route the cable to the right of the connector. Note that this move is not in the manual.
After the hardware assembly, I installed four Hitachi 500 Gig drives which are currently $110.00 each from newegg.
My RAID configuration is a single three disc raid 5 RAID set with the fourth drive configured as a hot spare.
I formatted the raid set as a single volume. The RAID card took about five hours to construct the raid set and another couple of hours to fully change the on-card backup battery.
After restoring from one or my previously made backups (using the disc utility). I was up and running.
Performance:
This is pretty impressive, especially when the file fits in the RAID's on-board buffers. Photoshop opens in three seconds. I am using this configuration mainly for reliability, and it is pretty nifty that reliability and speed arrive together. You could go faster by striping all of the drives, but nearly double is fine for me given I am now protected from disc failure. Smallish files read very rapidly, due to some predictive buffering I think. Largish files (of the one gig size or so) read at about double speed.
Is it worth the money?
$1000.00 is a lot, but I think of it as data insurance.
Other considerations:
I am continuing to use Leopard's time machine as well as an occasional external backup.
All of my really important stuff gets backed up off site via usb drive or the internet.
-bob