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RAID Compatibility List and Performance


sethius
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More and more manufacturers of low cost RAID solutions are writing OSX drivers for their products and more and more PC manufacturers are selling cost PCs with RAID 0/1 configurations (like my Dell Dimension 9200).. This Topic will document their progress and success stories of people using their cards in their hackintoshes..

 

ROCKETRAID 2310 OSX DRIVER http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/rr2310.htm

 

SILICON IMAGE OSX DRIVER http://www.siliconimage.com/support/suppor...id=2&osid=3

 

ARECA OSX DRIVER http://www.areca.com.tw/ and ftp://ftp.areca.com.tw/RaidCards/AP_Drivers/MacOS/

 

My personal opinion - loosely supported by the areca mac pro issue - is that currently avaliable raid cards won't boot in mac pros, but work once a driver, is loaded because they use EFI - which the raid cards do not recognise..

 

But.. because we are all using PCs, which in turn use BIOS, it stands to reason that some of these cards should be able to boot an OSX partition in the same way that Windows and a hacked OSX install are..

 

..I've just dicovered this review:

 

http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/rev...es/areca/1680x/

 

..which states that areca have released a firmware update for one (or some) of their cards to allow it to boot OSX on a Mac Pro..

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Unfortunately that Areca is an external SAS controller and I highly doubt that it's firmware would work on one of their internal controllers. =( I've been looking for the same thing, hopefully Areca will add support to some of their internal controllers soon.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi Sethius

 

What do you think is faster: a Mac Pro with the Apple raid card or a PC using any of the raid cards you mention (using the same hard drives)? Do you have benchmarks? How fast is reading/writing on your Dell Dimension 9200?

 

McMartin

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm using the HighPoint Technologies RocketRAID 3320

I have 8 500gb Western Digital WD5000AAKS in my RAID 5 array.

 

Running 10.5.1 Kalyway

Intel Q6600 2.4ghz

8gb of 667mhz ECC Kingston memory

D975XBX2 Badaxe2

HIS x1900xt Video Card

 

Here's my xbench of the array.

 

Results 235.41

System Info

Xbench Version 1.3

System Version 10.5.1 (9B18)

Physical RAM 8192 MB

Model Mac Pro

Drive Type HPT DISK 0_0

CPU Test 138.99

GCD Loop 283.79 14.96 Mops/sec

Floating Point Basic 137.70 3.27 Gflop/sec

vecLib FFT 111.98 3.69 Gflop/sec

Floating Point Library 110.34 19.21 Mops/sec

Thread Test 405.99

Computation 398.21 8.07 Mops/sec, 4 threads

Lock Contention 414.08 17.81 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads

Memory Test 158.59

System 183.91

Allocate 222.75 818.03 Kalloc/sec

Fill 161.40 7847.45 MB/sec

Copy 177.71 3670.52 MB/sec

Stream 139.40

Copy 127.90 2641.77 MB/sec

Scale 131.40 2714.65 MB/sec

Add 151.54 3228.15 MB/sec

Triad 150.01 3209.01 MB/sec

Quartz Graphics Test 217.64

Line 177.13 11.79 Klines/sec [50% alpha]

Rectangle 234.27 69.94 Krects/sec [50% alpha]

Circle 187.82 15.31 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]

Bezier 178.42 4.50 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]

Text 469.44 29.37 Kchars/sec

OpenGL Graphics Test 246.39

Spinning Squares 246.39 312.56 frames/sec

User Interface Test 335.25

Elements 335.25 1.54 Krefresh/sec

. Disk Test 468.08

. Sequential 279.96

. Uncached Write 314.65 193.19 MB/sec [4K blocks]

. Uncached Write 449.77 254.48 MB/sec [256K blocks]

. Uncached Read 125.20 36.64 MB/sec [4K blocks]

. Uncached Read 1112.67 559.22 MB/sec [256K blocks]

. Random 1426.88

. Uncached Write 707.05 74.85 MB/sec [4K blocks]

. Uncached Write 1212.34 388.12 MB/sec [256K blocks]

. Uncached Read 5165.70 36.61 MB/sec [4K blocks]

. Uncached Read 2698.65 500.75 MB/sec [256K blocks]

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Hi!

 

I have a HighPoint 2302 on my BadAxe 2 and it works very well with the Drivers provided. I Plan to add a 3120 RAID Card to the Mix with 2 x 150 GB Raptor`s... which i will try to configure as Startup-Disk (Bad Axe allows to configure the card as bootable, altough getting the system installed with efi and all is another twist...

 

So, i'm absolutely confident that the card will work... :)

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I have done my expansion with the second RAID-Controller as described in my last message, but must admit, after several hours of work and several Kernel-Panics that the two RAID-Cards don't work well together (Drivers conflicting, RAID-Web-Interface conflict), so i will retiurn the 3120 (which is, for itself a very well performing card and if two sata-ports are enough i would keep it).

 

But i need at least 4, better 8 Ports so i will go for the 3520 with the even faster INTEL-Controller on it. My Highpoint 2302 will go on Sale (90 Euros, if someone from europe is interested...).

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