Does Apple RAID card for Mac Pro 2008 work with El Capitan

The Apple RAID card is only needed for RAID 5 or similar schemes that require on-the-fly checksums.

If not doing RAID 5 Disk Utility can do Mirroring and Striping and Concatenating, and supports drives larger than 2.2TB. Terminal is not required unless you love Terminal and want to use it.

The Apple RAID card does not work with drives larger than 2.2 TB. It may work but you can't use more than 2.2 TB or a larer disk.

Google shows that others have asked if RAID card works in El Capitan but I could not find any answers

I am completely astounded that there is no GIU support for Disk Utility RAID in the initial release of Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan.

Apple does not appear to have announced what their plans are for RAID support using Disk Utility, some other Utility, or simply leaving you to fight with Terminal.

The underlying Diskutil RAID commands do appear, by all accounts, to be present in Terminal.

This says you can still use Terminal commands for RAID in EC

https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/3d7aw2/does_el_capitan_disk_utility_suppor t_raid/

Removal of the RAID card from a 2008 Mac Pro is a lot more complicated than just unplugging it. Reverse the installation instructions.

https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA353/en_US/MacPro_RAIDCard_Installatio n.pdf

PeterLeif wrote:

I am setting up a file server on a 2008 Mac Pro with a Apple RAID card but...

Does the Apple RAID care work with El Capitan since Apple removed the RAID setting for El Capitan?

Im running El Capitan Server.

I am thinking of using SoftRAID or terminal to setup the RAID but my question is if the Apple RAID card will work at all?

For what it's worth the Apple RAID Utility still exists in El Capitan. It is no longer in the Utilities folder but is now located at -

/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/RAID Utility

I have no idea if it actually still works. SoftRAID is the only software RAID5 solution for OS X however as far as I am aware it still does not support creating bootable volumes - should that be important to you. There are third-party RAID cards that can be fitted in to a classic Mac Pro and some of these will do RAID5. You would ideally want one which has an internal mini-SAS connector. You can then use the following kit to adapt the internal drive bays to connect to that third-party RAID card. See this for the drive bay kit http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_i d=189%20

See this as one example RAID card https://www.attotech.com/products/adapters/sas-sata-raid/6gb/ESAS-R644-000%20ESA S-R644-C00

I have the non-RAID version of the above card in a classic Mac Pro and it does boot successfully in El Capitan. I would contact ATTO Tech to discuss the RAID version, their website still only mentions Yosemite and has not been updated regarding El Capitan.

Note: Some brands of RAID card for the classic Mac Pro do not support booting in to OS X for example this one http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/MXPRMS6G1E1I/

Finally, most people are switching to external RAID solutions.

Not happy after upgrading to El Capitain Server and having an apple raid card configured. The new disc utility is useless, so it was great to see the raid utility is still there just buried away, it still seems to be working fine.

Thanks