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Bugs in Mac Pro?
- Thread starter I'mAMac
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"RAID" can be kind of confusing because the name was expanded years back to include just about any way to combine disks. The typical arrangements are:macgeek2005 said:
- Mirroring (formerly known as shadowing). Two disks work in unison, reading and writing exactly the same thing. One drive can die and you can continue working as though nothing happened. It's real-time backup of everything. The main drawback is cost.
- Striping. This is when you take two or more drives and format them as a single unit. Access is sped up because the sectors for one "disk" are spread out over multiple independently moving heads. Reliability goes down because a failure in any one drive of the stripe set loses everything.
- "real" RAID: This combines striping with some redundancy. Along with the regular data, a parity scheme is spread out among the drives too. You get some of the benefits of striping at read time, but some slowdown at write time because the additional recovery data has to be computed and stored. If you lose a disk in this arrangement, it's possible to plug in a replacement drive and automatically rebuild all the data from the information that's still on the remaining disks. (The warez pups borrowed this technique for their PAR files.)
There are mixes and matches of those schemes too, but you get the idea...
ender78 said:
Can't keep progress from happening, and Apple would not replace your motherboard for this. No way no chance. If it can be changed with a software patch, then maybe.
iMeowbot said:
so is there any way of doing the whole Striping thing in a software RAID in a new Mac Pro?? sorry if this is really dumb but i've never used RAID before and it sounds pretty interesting.
raid is great, it is mostly used in server environments, where you can just tear out a drive while the machine is running and put in a new one and it regenerates (thats how ours are at work)
raid 0/1 is pretty much useless, id prefer running raid 5 with 4 500gb hd's
so i can replace one and my system auto regenerate, then i would get the speed boosts, and data redundancy
that said, running raid is essential if your having to capture hd video. if you are not messing with video, you dont HAVE to have raid
raid 0/1 is pretty much useless, id prefer running raid 5 with 4 500gb hd's
so i can replace one and my system auto regenerate, then i would get the speed boosts, and data redundancy
that said, running raid is essential if your having to capture hd video. if you are not messing with video, you dont HAVE to have raid
bob5820 said:
?????
You have obviously never used high-end hardware raid!!
My old IBM server at school had SCSI-320 RAID-5 with 6 drives sitting in it. (One for automatic swapping) That thing could SCREAM!!!!
It was our file server, web server, mail server and compiling machine. I think I remember doing a benchmark on it that showed over 275 MB/s throughput. Nothing I could ever do would even make that thing sweat.
So, true software raid might not get you that much performance gain due to its overhead, but hardware raid is a different story...
You don't need special hardware to use that, so sure. The OS X software RAID can work on just about anything you can mount, some sickos have even done this with iPods and flash drivesstevo86 said:
For striping to work well, all the drives in the set should have the same geometry (preferably identical drives).It would be a really bad idea to try striping on a boot volume, this is really intended for temporary or scratch files (like the video capture example mentioned earlier).
iMeowbot said:
Barefeats.com has some good benchmarks and recommendations for fast boot drives including RAID 0 striping. Check it out: "August 17th, 2006 -- SHOOTOUT: What's the fastest boot drive for the Mac Pro? We compared seven SATA 3Gb/s drives to two Apple OEM drives. Includes results for booting from RAID 0 pairs."
Obviously, there are risks with striping your boot drive - better have a good backup plan or lose one and lose it all.
Personally, I'm planning on RAID 1 for a pair of 500GB maxtor maxline drives to provide auto backup of my data files - pix, video, music. It does suck to lose 500GB of capacity but it's worth the ease of mind in my case.
napolihos said:
I'm wondering... I originally thought (as watching that guy introduce Time Machine) that TM was just a RAID 1 setup with a clever software implementation, but now I'm wondering, what is it really? Just Leopard continually backing up your data to a external HDD (can you use a seconadry internal HDD) and keeping it organized for easy recover?
napolihos said:
Nice article but the results were pretty scattered. Especially the Seagate results, which is what i planned on buying in the future.
Would this be a reasonable setup for my Mac Pro in the future? 2x 250GB in RAID 0, 1x 500 GB for Time Machine, 160GB for windows xp... this is obviously for leopard so i have a good back up method.
I'mAMac said:
If you do the workaround, you need the drivers. It's as simple as that.
If you don't use the drivers, the speed of your hard drives will be awful.
It works because in a striping scheme, each hard drive has to read half the data since half of all your data is written to one HD, and half to the other, so when you're opening a file, the hard drives individually have to read only half using theoretically half the time.macgeek2005 said:
ammon said:
Your math is off.
Raid 5 = If a second drive in the set dies, all data is lost.
See http://www.baarf.com/
Mac Pro Bug update...
Seen one reported instance of a Mac pro dying after several days use. Cause unknown at this time - system fails to boot from DVD or hard disk...
Now as bad as this sounds, this is 1 (one) reported instance out of the Apple-only-knows how many Mac Pro systems. I would have been surprised not to see someone having problems.
The important point is that the Mac Pro still has not exhibited any widespread issues. What we have so far are a mix of self-inflicted problems, a scattering of random component failutes (stuff happens). What is going to be interesting to see is if there are any long term issues with non-Apple memory (both in performance and physically).
Meanwhile the emerging picture continues to be encouraging. The first Airport-equiped machines are beginning to show up. Soon we should see if they have any major issues.
After that there will be the first wave of ATI-video card systems. How much noise are those cards going to kick out????
Right now the Mac Pro is still looking good.
Seen one reported instance of a Mac pro dying after several days use. Cause unknown at this time - system fails to boot from DVD or hard disk...
Now as bad as this sounds, this is 1 (one) reported instance out of the Apple-only-knows how many Mac Pro systems. I would have been surprised not to see someone having problems.
The important point is that the Mac Pro still has not exhibited any widespread issues. What we have so far are a mix of self-inflicted problems, a scattering of random component failutes (stuff happens). What is going to be interesting to see is if there are any long term issues with non-Apple memory (both in performance and physically).
Meanwhile the emerging picture continues to be encouraging. The first Airport-equiped machines are beginning to show up. Soon we should see if they have any major issues.
After that there will be the first wave of ATI-video card systems. How much noise are those cards going to kick out????
Right now the Mac Pro is still looking good.
There was a posting at the Macnn forums from a member who did some press interviews regarding the MacPro, one of which was with the MacPro product manager. He got to hear a 3Ghz with the X1900 and he said even with that, it was still really quiet, big improvment over the Quads with fan equipped video cards.MacsAttack said:
Correct I was refering to software/motherboard based RAID. I not sure that the lack of performance on the desktop is due so much to the software/hardware as it is the typical usage model. On a desktop you just are not doing the sustained reads that you are doing with a sever. Benchmarks on desktop raid look impresive but when you compare actual load times of lets say photoshop, how much of an improvement do you see. Certainaly nothing like 1/2 the time of a single drive. I just feel that raid has been overhyped beyond its intended use. But I do agree with you RAID does have its place on servers.ammon said:
bob5820 said:
Bob is right. Regardless of this "high-end raid hardware" usage patterns on a workstation TYPICALLY don't match that of a server. In a server RAID really shines.
Not to say you won't get a slight boost, however it is not worth the cost IMO.
OK - seen a second report of a DoA Mac Pro.
While there must have been more than just two (not everyone posts on the forums I keep an eye on), that is still looking like a reasuringly low incident rate.
Now... if only the people who are supposed to be delivering my Mac Pro could find the thing and get on with it!
While there must have been more than just two (not everyone posts on the forums I keep an eye on), that is still looking like a reasuringly low incident rate.
Now... if only the people who are supposed to be delivering my Mac Pro could find the thing and get on with it!
relimw said:
http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32818
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32842
http://sharikou.blogspot.com/2006/07/intel-core-2-self-fragged-stability.html
One interseting thing is that Intel have also been working to release updated steppings of CPUs and chipsets...
http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33942
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/07/21/intel_updates_core2duo_chipsets/
MacsAttack said:
A very interesting bit of reading
I hope Apple has worked through the issues with Intel, or we might end up with new Rev B machines at their expense. Not that that is bad for us, but it will mean downtime, and cause for some alarm if there are precision related problems as well.blogspot said:
rylin said:
Hmmm, did you actually read what I typed? I said I have to loose 2 drives before the data is gone. Meaning if I only loose one drive I can still rebuild the array. (As I have done before)
I am quite familiar with RAID configurations.