SSD in xserve RAID

The person in that 'edugeek' post is me!

The particular RAID in question is still running one side with 5x 256GB SSD in RAID 5, and 5x 500GB SATA 2.5" traditional drives in RAID 5 on the other. Over the past year there have been no faults or stability problems running an XServe RAID "hacked" in this way.

There is not a dramatic performance improvement in all honesty. I don't have any benchmarks to hand but I would say there is a slight improvment in performance. Things to remember are, particularly for our set-up, that there is only 2Gbps in to this XServe RAID over fibre channel, and we use ours for network home folders so it handles requests for everything typically 70 concurrent users may need, per side - more or less depending on which combinations of year groups are on the system.

I do love the XServe RAID and have had 4 since they were introduced, to when they were discontinued, through various hacks and enhancements to keep them in business to today. We've kept them running with refurbished parts but it is now sensible for us to look at replacing them - staring in a couple of months. There are current, supported, products out there with faster I/O to the host, and faster I/O to the drives, as well as using standard readily available HDDs rather than IDE drives in a specialist carrier.

That said, I don't know what your application is!

I know that this thread is quite old, so hope you are still out there stephenberry.

I finally got around to switching over to 2.5" drives in my raid. When I attempt to create the array in Raid Admin, everything looks like it is working fine. However, the blue "work" indicator light on the front of the drive cartridge is not flashing like it would with the 3.5" standard approved drives. Is this your experience?

Also, do you happen to have the part number of the sata2ide brd you used? I would like to compare to the one that I am using (actually ordered a couple different options for best fit).

Thanks!

the blue "work" indicator light on the front of the drive cartridge is not flashing like it would with the 3.5" standard approved drives

This is a common report from people who use non-Apple drives in their arrays. It may be firmware related, but whatever the reason it doesn't necessarily impair the drive's performance.

It's a StarTech IDE2SAT

http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/public/tguyFqHgpy00MLCtRwhA0KY866z7yJREkagtvrTk T50mG-q_EdJVzW4awtItdMfr0XMihvzFPcJGVp_Fr4wstwsUzwOVqrsve6vmxOs7CfSALGxvex4RpzXW IfJO1zPLwPpoBzAcIJ6MIem3693UQj3y4a0

We also found that our lights work as normal.

We are now retiring our RAIDs - there's only so far you can go with them in the modern day. They are now using 1TB drives and providing backup and archive space where speed is not a worry.

I am also trying this out as I'm running out of 750GB IDE spare drives and I have 3 XSERVE RAIDS to maintain... I've purchased the StarTech IDE2SAT bridge, however I'm having an issue getting the 2.5" drive to power up. I plugged the 4 pin male molex into the existing ADM Female molex, but it does not power the drive for some reason? To make sure it's not a carrier issue, I placed a good 750GB IDE Drive in the carrier and it mounts in an old XSERVE G4 fine, I also mounted the new 2.5" 750GB SATA drive in my mac, and it mounts fine. I've tried moving the jumper from Cable, to Master to Slave, all with no luck.

Any insight would be appreciated

Thanks

LJS

Hi,

My drives have been Samsung Spinpoint 1TB drives, and WD Caviar Black 500GB. I do place a piece of antistatic material under the drive between it and the ADM to stop metal/electronics contact. I presume you are on the 1.5.1 firmware for the RAID too, as you are already using 750 GB drives?

I sorted this out last night, it seems the power canle that came with the IDE2SAT had a short, once I tried it with a known working one, all is well.

Many Thanks for your reply

LJS