I'm a recent OSX convert. It offers all the joys of Linux with all the niceties of Windows.

Unfortunately... RAID support seems terrible and I'm not shelling out $800 for a Apple RAID card when that will buy me an Acera with 4x the cache, twice as many SAS ports and a much better RAID engine.

Can anyone recommend a quality hardware based raid card (i.e. XOR, parity, etc. is done on the card) that works well with OSX but doesn't cost that much.

Thanks in advance.

Mike

osx supports software raid, you can just use 2 sata disks and configure them as raid without any onboard or external raid controler.

Areca 1222 (8 ports, mine came with mini sas to sata cables).

I've got one and it's raid bootable.
I didn't event have to install the drivers as they are integrated in Leopard.

Still it's cheaper but not cheap (round 500$?)
Areca 1212 should be cheaper (4 ports)

I'm also trying to find a RAID card, but I'm having trouble finding anything that I know will work. I want a hardware RAID because I'm going to have an NTFS partition, so I need windows to see it in the RAID. I also dont want to spend more than about $75 for one.

I have a cheapo Highpoint RocketRaid 2300 4 port card that I can successfully boot from, and Mac drivers are freely available. In fact I can install vanilla 10.5 using the DFE bootdisk method onto a GPT HFS+ partition on the drive, but had to go back to MBR to support my XP NTFS partitions. You can still use Munky's modified EFI partition boot trick with an MBR disk - the main difference being you'll have to create your own HFS+ partition for the bootloader which will still show up as mounted at boot time. Moving to the RAID array improved seemed a bit underwhelming at first...

Until going back to a single SATA disk!

I think I saw somewhere that this card will work. For just a basic 2 hard drive RAID0, could I get it to work as a hardware RAID in Leopard?

According to this thread there is a good chance you can get it working. It uses the 3132 chipset...

Whats wrong with the 3132 chipset?

if you use 4GB of RAM the sil3132 will cause kp´s and freezes. highpoint is the best choice at the moment

Would this card work then? Thats about as much as I want to spend on a RAID card, and it looks like it will do everything I need it to.

this a PCI card. I would prefer a PCIe card. it depends also on the PCI bandwith of your mainboard.

not sure if this one is still supported at 10.5.x ...

also not sure if it needs a special server 64-bit PCI slot though -

http://computers.pricegrabber.com/storage-...ers/m/14584904/

also this one is a bit cheaper but again not sure how well it would work -
http://www.acard.com.tw/english/fb01-produ...mp;type1_idno=3

finally, this link suggests that even hardware raid is not that much faster than the native software version -
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/OSX_RAIDvsIDE_Card_RAID.html

Have no any cheaper bootable card for raid 0 and 1 ?
Can some body told me?