Mac Pro 3,1 (early 2008) RAID card hangs at startup

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Level 1

9 points

Mac Pro 3,1 (early 2008) RAID card hangs at startup

Hello,

I have a Mac Pro 2.8Ghz Quad Core (early 2008) with 10GB RAM and 512MB VRAM.

I have noticed that the Mac Pro RAID card hangs at startup for RAID volumes.

It seems to start okay with a single boot drive (have used both WD Raptor 150GB 10K and Seagate 'factory' 320GB 7200rpm as boot drives...)

But the RAID 0 array using two factory 1TB WD 7200rpm is what seems to hang at startup. I have run Disk Warrior, Disk Utility and RAID Utility and found no major errors...

Any suggestions? Have already replaced the RAID Card battery with OEM part.

Thanks!

Mac Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)

Posted on Mar 31, 2015 2:26 PM

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Answer 1

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Mar 31, 2015 2:34 PM in response to madmalcolm

Say good-bye to the Apple Pro RAID card. It started its life as a $999 card to support SAS/SCSI and/or RAID5.

Then the problems with 2.5TB drives, battery, and does it really do something and add to your system.

I would use SoftRAID and create a 3-drive mirror of 2TB drives instead.

And an SSD for the system.

Seems like those are some very old drives.

I have a lot of the 150GB 10K VR drives, and some 300GB along with older 74GB and a couple of the Raptor series. Loud and while solid I would use for spare boot drives, clone only.

Backup your data, pull the RAID card, and restore to the drives. And clone the system onto a 250GB $109 SSD. $139 buys a 400MB/sec writes and 800MB/sec reads Samsung PCIe-SSD XP941. None of my SCSI 15K drives would come close.

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Answer 2

madmalcolm Author

Level 1

9 points

Mar 31, 2015 2:44 PM in response to The hatter

Great advice, thank you! I have the system backed up to both an external G-Drive and internally to one of the other drives.

Have been looking to upgrade to SSD and will lose the RAID card if I can setup soft RAID using the onboard controller.

Thanks!

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