ninetto Posted August 26, 2008 Share Posted August 26, 2008 Hello, does anybody have a good solution for cross-platform raid, i.e. RAID 0 or RAID 1 (internal card or external) which will work for both Apple and Windows? This would be really nice for video editing on both systems. I recall one member "Nonny Moose" who had hot-swap trays attached to a rocketraid-card in his machine... and switched the hard-drive pairs according to which system he wanted to boot into. Hard drives have gotten cheaper, but it seems like there must be a better way! suggestions? regards, ninetto Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/122914-cross-platform-raid/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
typewriter Posted August 27, 2008 Share Posted August 27, 2008 You can use areca controllers (in Germany marketed by Tekram). Not cheap but extremly fast (around 400 euro for a 8 port controller). You need a pcie slot with 4x or better 8x, e.g, you second Graficcard pcie (SLI) slot. OSX drivers are available. The cards support Raid 6. I recall the controllers are already recogniced by osx. There are special versions available for macs but I guess that the reason for that is caused by the limited space in a mac pro case. With a Hacmac you should be able to use the normal Pc versions with mac drivers. May be cheaper. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/122914-cross-platform-raid/#findComment-870359 Share on other sites More sharing options...
jokinawa Posted September 4, 2008 Share Posted September 4, 2008 Today I installed my Areca ARC-1220 8 Port SATA2 controller. I worked out of box with iDeneb v1.1 10.5.4 including JaS 10.5.4 Server files. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/122914-cross-platform-raid/#findComment-879221 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beartech Posted September 6, 2008 Share Posted September 6, 2008 I can't say enough good things about the Highpoint RocketRaid At first I thought it looked kinda cheesy, like some repacked generic card. Not so!!! I purchased the 2640x4 for my hackintosh (Dell Optiplex 620). Mind you this is a SAS card, not a SATA card, but all of the SATA cards under $100 are complete junk and should be avoided. I paid $150 at newegg.com for my 2640x4. The nice thing is that it's PCI-e 4x, and can be used in a 16x, 4x, or 1x slot. All SAS controllers will accept SATA drives and the performance of the SAS controllers is often much better. This allows you to upgrade to SAS when the price comes down. The 2640x4 uses regular SATA ports on the motherboard and comes with SATA to SAS cables. So if you are using SATA drives you will have to provide regular old SATA cables. (most drives come with them, my SATA backplane came with 4). This card supporst ALL OSes!!!! Go to their sight and check it out, Win, Mac, BSD, and many flavors of linux. The instruction manual it came with actually had instructions for linux, BSD, and Mac installs!! I plugged it in, plugged in my drives, powered up. Hit ctrl-H to configure the raid (I chose raid 5), then booted off the non raid system disk I was already using. I installed the Mac drivers, rebooted and I have a new volume ready to format in Disk Utility. Just about 1TB of RAID 5 using 4 cheap SATA drives. The features on this card are incredible. Many features that the $100 cards will never have, and many that are only usually found on $400+ cards. I am sold on this company! www.highpoint-tech.com Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/122914-cross-platform-raid/#findComment-881730 Share on other sites More sharing options...
ninetto Posted September 6, 2008 Author Share Posted September 6, 2008 Hey thanks so much for this tip, this sounds great! I read thru the owner's guide, but one thing is still not clear to me: the format of the disks initialized for a raid array is native to the bios of the RocketRaid card? And thus the same disks initialized for the card will be readable/writable by BOTH OSX and XP on the same machine? That is what I hope, anyway. greetings, ninetto Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/122914-cross-platform-raid/#findComment-881841 Share on other sites More sharing options...
jokinawa Posted September 7, 2008 Share Posted September 7, 2008 UPDATE on my Areca ARC-1220: It does show up in the install process as an installable disk!! Also some Xbenches on the Array: 8x500GB Results 572.32 System Info Xbench Version 1.3 System Version 10.5.4 (9E17) Physical RAM 2048 MB Model MacPro3,1 Drive Type Areca ARC-1220-VOL#00 Disk Test 572.32 Sequential 350.86 Uncached Write 319.45 196.14 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 919.29 520.14 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 156.25 45.73 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 1278.30 642.46 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random 1551.72 Uncached Write 653.45 69.18 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 1691.65 541.56 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 6152.44 43.60 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 3403.91 631.62 MB/sec [256K blocks] Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/122914-cross-platform-raid/#findComment-882154 Share on other sites More sharing options...
ninetto Posted September 8, 2008 Author Share Posted September 8, 2008 Okay, excuse the naive question about raid-volume formats being compatible with both OS-systems. After reading Beartech's post about formating the new raid volume with Disk Utility, it is clear to me that the disk format is not some exclusive Card-BIOS rosetta-stone. Soooo, want I would now like to know: does anyone have experience using MacDrive to see OSX Raid Volumes? Does it work, is the speed OK? ciao, ninetto Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/122914-cross-platform-raid/#findComment-883233 Share on other sites More sharing options...
bouloi75 Posted October 5, 2008 Share Posted October 5, 2008 I can't say enough good things about the Highpoint RocketRaid At first I thought it looked kinda cheesy, like some repacked generic card. Not so!!! I purchased the 2640x4 for my hackintosh (Dell Optiplex 620). Mind you this is a SAS card, not a SATA card, but all of the SATA cards under $100 are complete junk and should be avoided. I paid $150 at newegg.com for my 2640x4. The nice thing is that it's PCI-e 4x, and can be used in a 16x, 4x, or 1x slot. All SAS controllers will accept SATA drives and the performance of the SAS controllers is often much better. This allows you to upgrade to SAS when the price comes down. The 2640x4 uses regular SATA ports on the motherboard and comes with SATA to SAS cables. So if you are using SATA drives you will have to provide regular old SATA cables. (most drives come with them, my SATA backplane came with 4). This card supporst ALL OSes!!!! Go to their sight and check it out, Win, Mac, BSD, and many flavors of linux. The instruction manual it came with actually had instructions for linux, BSD, and Mac installs!! I plugged it in, plugged in my drives, powered up. Hit ctrl-H to configure the raid (I chose raid 5), then booted off the non raid system disk I was already using. I installed the Mac drivers, rebooted and I have a new volume ready to format in Disk Utility. Just about 1TB of RAID 5 using 4 cheap SATA drives. The features on this card are incredible. Many features that the $100 cards will never have, and many that are only usually found on $400+ cards. I am sold on this company! www.highpoint-tech.com Hi, I did purchase the same card but unfortunately it doesn't work for me on my hackintosh (Asus P5E). I've been able to install the driver (kext), I can connnect to the Web GUI Raid, see the devices, configure an array. But no volume is then visible in diskUtility. Am I missing something? I didn't see any error message in the console log. Which kernel are you booting (Mach, Vanilla,...)? Thanks, Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/122914-cross-platform-raid/#findComment-918242 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts