ATTO UL5D PCIe card recommendations

The trouble is ATTO's UL5D is the only PCIe game in town. You can't use PCI or PCI-X cards. Yes, ATTO is good (I use three of their UL3-series, but in G4s). And I don't think you will find better. The card is new, and maybe that is part of why there is no UL5S.

At least they keep improving their drivers and offer support for OS X.

It's a good and fast SCSI card. Performance seems to be similar to the UL4D.

According to ATTO, it does not currently- nor is it likely to in the future- support deep sleep, and when installed, it will prevent the Quad from doing so- even if nothing is attached to the card. You can try sleep from the Apple menu; the display will go black and internal mobo SATA hard drives will spin down, but then shortly a full-on fanfest will ensue which is escapeable by hitting the space bar.

Other than that, I've had no problems with card. I run 4 x Atlas 15K II drives in RAID0 on two external channels and performance has been rock-solid and stable since installing the card a few months ago.

G5 Quad Mac OS X (10.4.6)

ATTO's latest driver for the UL3D added a feature (to G4 MDD that wasn't there before) to be able to power up drives AFTER startup - a feature that the UL4D supported in G5. Still have to scan the bus from within ATTO Config. I think the UL4D even allows connecting cables, something that when I mistakenly tried when I didn't realize the system was in deep sleep would corrupt a drive (and require re-zeroing).

If I have any drives attached and running on UL3D, I never let drives spin down, and if I booted from SCSI drive and did put the system to sleep, it would not (at least in the past, have not tried with new driver) not spin back up - the system would lock up or not respond.

Deep sleep with running SCSI drives isn't something I need. As for disabling deep sleep... I wouldn't hold my breath of course, but. And sounds like it might require a redesigned board or chipset. LSI use to make ATTO's and now I think LSI sold their chip business.

I wonder if a new card in Power (Intel) Mac or new PCIe architecture will change that. (ATTO in their email years ago would call 'sleep' as "advanced power management."

With drives like 150GB Raptor and less expensive SATA controllers than UL5D Ultra320...

You can only put three Atlas 15K IIs on one channel right now for a stripped RAID. Where is SAS on Mac? SAS drives are becoming available from more vendors, too.

But none of that affects a tape library, where a single channel card would do fine.