Someone here with Apple Raid Card experience?

[AlexMaximus]

Hi guys,

At the moment I dream about a very nice hardware raid, one I can put in my 2012 Mac Pro Hex 3,33 GHz.
I would love use two new 2TB Enterprise Class WD HDD's or two 4TB REDs.
I would like to go for the Apple Raid pci raid card because it would be a hardware raid and no software raid.

Now to the question:

Does it work as advertised and is it a true professional solution?

Have you been satisfied with it and did it work for you?

Is it as solid as the iphone, as "it just works"

 

[OS6-OSX]

Two companies to look at pertaining to RAID:
http://www.areca.com.tw/
https://www.attotech.com/products/family.php?id=1

Also read online about RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60.

Using only 2 drives in a RAID configuration that's not RAID 0 SW may be a waste of a card.

 

[ScottishCaptain]

I bought mine with my 2010 Mac Pro (along with 4x1TB Apple WD drives).

I've never had any problems with it. For the most part, I don't even know it's there. The speeds are good enough for me, though a lot of people claim it's a slower card (even though it's faster then any single mechanical drive).

My only two complaints are:

1) It reconditions the battery every 90 days and disables the write cache while it does this, you need to go force the cache back on (but only if you're running your computer on an adequate UPS, since you will lose a tremendous amount of data if the power cuts out while the battery is reconditioning and the cache is in use)

2) It's not supported under Windows, making it impossible to boot from the 4 built-in disk bays (since they all get switched to the RAID card slot through the logic board, and there's no Windows drivers for the RAID card)

Several folks seem to have had bad experiences with these cards. I never have, so either I'm lucky, or a lot of people are doing weird stuff with their cards. Either way, as far as running OS X goes, it seems to be a very solid card in my opinion. There's no drivers to fuss around with and it just works.

-SC

 

[Riot Nrrrd]

AlexMaximus,

I have a 2010 Mac Pro with the Apple RAID Card (firmware version E-1.3.2.0) and 4x2TB drives.

I get about 60% usable space out of it:

[16:39] nightowl:/etc % df -Ph /Volumes/Media
Filesystem     Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk2s2  4.8Ti  4.0Ti  743Gi    85%    /Volumes/Media

[16:39] nightowl:/etc % df -PH /Volumes/Media
Filesystem     Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk2s2   5.2T   4.4T   797G    85%    /Volumes/Media

It mostly works great (with the issues ScottishCaptain raises - although I don't consider the battery reconditioning to be a complaint/issue, it's more a brief "cost of doing business" inconvenience), but I do have one major issue with it - every so often when I shut the machine down, on power-up after I log in I see an alert claiming that there's a RAID problem and asking me if I want to bring up RAID Utility.

When I bring up RAID Utility it says "Degraded RAID set RS1 - No spare available for rebuild".

Somehow it loses its marbles and loses track of the spare. No idea why.

When I select it in RAID Utility, it shows up as being "Roaming" rather than being attached as the global spare. All I have to do is reattach it as the spare and then wait for the RAID to rebuild, which takes about 11-12 hours these days.

The main problem (besides being annoying) is that previously, this happened enough times that eventually the spare wasn't seen as a disk anymore, and I had to buy a new spare to get it working again.

I wasn't too thrilled about that as they are Enterprise drives and not particularly cheap, plus the thing was basically unused since it was the spare! So far so good with the replacement drive - and I try not to power off the system unless absolutely necessary.