11/01/2007, 12:00pm, EDT
Thursday, November 1st
Apple ships Mac Pro RAID card upgrade
Apple has begun offering its RAID controller cards as a separate upgrade for its Mac Pro high-end desktop systems. Mac OS X already allows users to stripe two, three, or four hard drives in a RAID 0 array for increased performance with a large storage capacity. The operating system also supports RAID 1 mirroring for protecting critical data against drive failure, while the new Mac Pro RAID card supports hardware RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 0+1. The new card features 256MB of RAID cache, a 72-hour cache protecting battery, and sequential read performance of up to 304MB/sec in RAID 0 or up to 199MB/sec in RAID 5 without the need for any external drive enclosures. Apple's new Mac Pro RAID card is available via the online store as a configuration option for new Mac Pro purchases, adding $1,000 to the price of potential Mac Pro purchases.
Apple states: "The Mac Pro RAID Card delivers enhanced storage performance and data protection through a powerful hardware RAID engine, 256MB of cache, and an integrated 72-hour battery for protecting cache data. The card occupies the top PCI Express slot (slot 4) of your Mac Pro and requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later."
Users looking to enable a Mac Pro for hardware RAID can install the Mac Pro RAID Card and two or more hard drives in bays 1 through 4. Each RAID level requires a minimum number of hard drives, however, with Enhanced JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) needing just one drive and RAID 0+1 requiring four separate drives.
The Mac Pro RAID card ships with an installation tool as well as detailed setup instructions.
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Apple has offered RAID cards as an option for a while now. What's the big news here? Is this version somehow different? The article makes it sounds like the option of a RAID card is new as of today...
What's new is that before today, you could only order the RAID cards as CTO options. You couldn't retrofit them into already-purchased Mac Pros or Xserves. Now you can! w00t!
Its from Apple, so it MUST be better!
Hell, just look at the picture and compare it to any sub-$100 card out there... obviously more is going on in this card.
So do the Sonnet cards.
The Highpoint 3320 costs about $490.00. The RocketRAID 2340 is about $550.00.
I'm still waiting for someone to justify spending $1,000 for an Apple card that only supports the internal cards and doesn't run any kind of external enclosure whatsoever.
The Highpoint cards have the same features, and then some. The Highpoint cards are definitely not "consumer" grade hardware.
Testudio is right. I'll elaborate a bit. Just because something says "Apple" on it doesn't mean it's necessarily the best.
How many of you buy RAM from Apple?
If not, the Apple card is worth the money and then some.