Apple ships Mac Pro RAID card upgrade
updated 12:00 pm EDT, Thu November 1, 2007
Apple ships RAID cards
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.
WTF
11/01, 12:47pm reply
$1,000 !!
BelugaShark
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Aug 2007
Re: wtf
11/01, 12:54pm reply
belugashark, please take a moment to do a little research before you make baseless comments like this. If you had any clue about the type of card this is and what market segments it is targeted at, then you would realize that $1K is a very good price for such a board from a first party vendor. This RAID board is NOT the same as the typical consumer level RAIDs that can be purchased from the likes of Highpoint and Sonnet Technologies. If you were to compare this board with boards from HP and Dell, you will see that Apple's price is very reasonable.
csimon2
Junior Member
Joined: Aug 2000
relax csi
11/01, 01:36pm reply
$1,000 for controlling only internal drives, which happens to be only 4 kinda sucks. I usually like to configure the OS as an internal RAID 1, and the data in an external RAID 5 enclosure with an active Parity drive.
BelugaShark
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Aug 2007
Huh?
11/01, 01:46pm reply
What am I missing here?
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...
csi95
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Apr 2005
Standalone
11/01, 02:57pm reply
To csi:
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!
Oneota
Mac Elite
Joined: May 2000
csimon2
11/01, 03:02pm reply
Care to elaborate on how this "professional" card, with it's &1,000 price is superior to say the "consumer" Highpoint 2000 or 3000 series?
gskibum3
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Nov 2006
comparison
11/01, 04:13pm reply
Care to elaborate on how this "professional" card, with it's &1,000 price is superior to say the "consumer" Highpoint 2000 or 3000 series?
Its from Apple, so it MUST be better!
testudo
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Aug 2001
Pro vs consumer
11/01, 04:27pm reply
This is a hardware RAID-5... consumer cards rely on the CPU to compute the parity bits, constantly taking a chunk of available processing power. Plus the backup battery.
h***, just look at the picture and compare it to any sub-$100 card out there... obviously more is going on in this card.
Guest
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Nov 1999
guest
11/01, 07:15pm reply
The Highpoint cards cost MUCH more than $100.00.
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?
gskibum3
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Nov 2006
worth 1000
11/02, 12:38am reply
Can you boot a RAID off the NON Apple cards?
If not, the Apple card is worth the money and then some.
Guest
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Nov 1999