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2009 mac pro raid question

I have a 2009 mac pro and am considering grabbing the appropriate apple raid card (used). Just a few questions since i've never used it (thought i've used other raids so i understand the technology in general):


1. when using the apple raid card, can you fill the first bay with a non raid-ed drive, then raid the other 3 bays? I have a third party SSD in drive bay 1 that i use for startup.

2. can you use third party drives?I know this is not officially supported/allowed by apple. but can you do it anyway by simply hooking up appropriate drives?

Mac Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3), Apple Mac Pro Quad 2.66 2009Nehalem

Posted on May 20, 2015 12:27 AM

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5 replies

May 20, 2015 1:33 AM in response to RayFixesStuff

Why do yo think you need an Apple Raid card?

Why do you need a Raid? Yo can get good speed with SSDs and they are reasonably priced and you can get large HDs

They are troublesome on large disks

RAID card limitation on older MacPro (early 2008) seems to be 2.2TB

http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=71248.0

There are apps that can run Raid like Soft Raid

http://www.softraid.com/

May 20, 2015 2:55 AM in response to RayFixesStuff

The simplest and actually much faster solution would be to move the SSD to a suitable PCIe adapter card. There are such cards to utilise standard 2.5" SATA SSD drives, or mSATA drives, or PCIe SSD drives. The main benefit is that such cards support the full SATAIII speed of 6Gbps whereas the built-in SATA drive bays on your Mac Pro are only SATAII i.e. 3Gbps.


In your case the following is probably worth looking at and is bootable on your Mac Pro.


http://www.apricorn.com/products/desktop-ssd-hdd-upgrade-kits/vel-solox1.html


A PCIe SSD like those used in the new MacBooks would be about twice as fast as a SATAIII SSD.

May 20, 2015 6:23 AM in response to RayFixesStuff

The Apple RAID card is sort of a PITA.

The battery.

The lack of support for 2.5TB+ drives (yes you can use WD etc)

SATA II for an SSD "works" but better off havng PCIe-SSD Express and not be on the controller.

SoftRAID 5 is awesome. 3-drive mirror with stripe reads and more features.

Apple RAID for RAID5... not getting any endorsements.


As with any hardware RAID, backups are more important (can't read the data without).


Came out in 2007 for $999 and was the only internal support for SAS which looked "useful.,"


We do tend to ask and find that 'why' while it may not seem important or wanted or critical to an answer, is and does matter and needs to be taken into consderation.


Always include in your reserch the reader reports:

www.xlr8yourmac.com

www.macintouch.com under storage

2009 mac pro raid question

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