Revodrive in Mac OSX

[Boomhowler]

I found this on ocz/tonymacx86.com, a Revodrive (or apparently Revodrive X2 also, haven't tried that one though) works in OSX by just installing these drivers:

http://www.siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=27&cat=3

(I used the SiI 3124 Mac OS X 10.6 SATARAID5 7/14/2010 2.0.5.0 version)

It was super easy and it works wonderful ocz should buy these drivers and sell the old Revo's to us Mac Pro users!

ps. I'm using a 2008 mac pro

pps. there is some trick to get it to work to boot from the drive, but I haven't tried it. Check on tonymacx86. I'm just using it as a user-drive/games.. Awesome!

 

[rejon]

For real?

Hi Boomhowler,

Been reading through all these threads about getting SATA3+ performance on older mac pros and sounds looks like a great alternative to getting a PCIe card and doing lots of rewiring. Saw you post a reference to this on another thread but nobody else but you seems to have had much luck with the Revodrive...

Can I ask for details in terms of how well the drive is holding up since this post? If you might have tried it on any other systems? Is the drive running in hardware raid as it is meant to? What speeds are you getting? I'm using a mac pro 2008, 8-core, running 10.6.7. Any reason why it might not work that you can see?

Thanks!

 

[elvisizer]

i've been using a revo x2 in my mac pro for almost a year now. the silicon image reference drivers that boom howler linked to work fine, though I should mention that I'm still running 10.6.8 . . . .haven't tested this with lion at all yet.

One thing I had to do was to un-check the 'put drives to sleep when possible' setting in energy saver . . . On my system that would make the revo spontaneously un-mount. that could by unique to my system, tho- I have a pioneer blu ray drive installed as well that is known to have issues with that setting, so it's possible that it was the optical interacting with the revo.
Regardless, the revo has not unmounted by itself since I turned that off.

Read/write benchmarks are ok, but keep in mind that my revo is my windows boot drive, so it is formatted NTFS. I'm sure the OS X performance is hindered by having to work through the tuxera NTFS driver instead of a native filesystem driver. I haven't done any benching of the revo with HFS+ volumes on it.

 

[rejon]

revodrive on mac osx

Thanks for the feedback. 'Ok' benchmarks? Would love to see some speed test results to see if it's more worthwhile than going for a SATA3 SSD. I'd be using it as a scratch drive. How fast is it doing sustained reads/writes?

Would also be great to know if Lion screws things up at all as I'll probably have to go there at some point... Do drop a line if ya ever give it a go!

 

[Boomhowler]

Ah good that someone with SL have tried it as well since I only use it on Lion.

I can do some benchmarking tonight when I get back home from work.

 

[rejon]

elvisizer - would also be good to know if you are running SL in 64-bit or 32-bit?

 

[elvisizer]

elvisizer - would also be good to know if you are running SL in 64-bit or 32-bit?

whatever the default is for a 2008 MP, I haven't changed it.

----------

Thanks for the feedback. 'Ok' benchmarks? Would love to see some speed test results to see if it's more worthwhile than going for a SATA3 SSD. I'd be using it as a scratch drive.

Unless your scratch drive is going to be NTFS my benchmarks would be meaningless.

 

[Boomhowler]

AJA, system test (Sweep Binary Frame Sizes)

Aja,
KB MB/sec
Read Write
16.0 88.3 98.1
32.0 134.9 135.6
64.0 229.6 222.1
128.0 329.9 297.7
256.0 424.6 463.1
512.0 552.9 531.7
1024.0 607.9 560.6
2048.0 655.9 588.2
4096.0 677.8 602.0
6144.0 683.6 604.4
8192.0 690.4 609.7

it starts off a bit sluggish but on a good day you can get >700MBps out of this one. It's a Revodrive X2, 240GB variant. It's been used for half a year and is "half full (or empty...)" now. I use it as the drive which houses the user folders on my computer, and some games (reading in maps takes no-time )

 

[g2mediagroup]

I'm considering buying one of these used and wondered if anyone has gotten it to work as the boot drive for OSX (SL...yes, I will upgrade EVENTUALLY )

 

[Boomhowler]

Instead of forcing this to work as a boot drive I would suggest you buying a OWC accelsior pci-e ssd from www.macsales.com. Apparently it works out of the box with the mac pro, very convenient. I'm waiting for one at the moment, stupid usps being slow!!

 

[chrisrand]

I just bought one of eBay as they are having a major price reduction from the original asking price of $300, now its only $109 w/ free shipping for the 220gb model.

I'm bumping the thread to get interest going again as this will be the final touches on my fully supercharged original Mac Pro 1,1 upgraded to 2,1 firmware and SMC, that has been fitted with a pair of x5355 Quad Cores, 32gb ram, ATI HD5870, and now an 220gb SSD PCI-E that I want to use as my boot drive.

Hoping I'm not the only one intending to use my 2006 MP until 2016.

Thanks guys for all your help!