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Mac Pro Raid Card
After blowing thru 2 mac pro raid cards on my early 2008 Mac Pro, the damage sustained was such that Applecare provided a brand new 2009 Mac Pro to replace it. Now the Raid card on this unit has died.
Has anyone had experience with this part? Any idea why it keeps self destructing? My work flow is pretty simple. P2 ingest to DVC PRO HD, I pretty much use only FCP 7.0.2, Compressor, Boris Red and Pshop.
Early 2009 Octo 2.93
Mac Raid Card
3 x “Apple” 640gb drives in Raid Zero (7200rpm)
1 x “Apple” system drive 1TB (7200rpm)
FCS 3, FCP 7.0.2
12 GB Ram
OS X 10.5.6Is is me? Could I possibly be doing something to trash these Raid cards? All I do is edit….
All comments appreciated – new card on the way but will be down for days.
Peter Tours
TnT Video Services, Inc.
Fort Lauderdale, FL -
18 Replies
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and why do you keep buying Apple components ? No other manufacturer has failures like this. Any brand you see advertised on Creative Cow has better performance than the Apple RAID card.
Bob Zelin
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Bob – It’s not that I keep buying Apple Raid cards…they are just Applecare replacements. Made sense at the time….bought it with my original 2008 Mac Pro. It was new, no track record yet. Time has shown it’s an abysmal failure but the investment is made. Applecare keep replacing it..and even the computer itself last March when I had a total failure during an on-site service raid card battery replacement. Apple aren’t going to buy me another brand device…wish they would. The investment is made – really can’t afford a new Raid right now.
I have seen your postings and articles and respect your opinion. Do you ever recommend an internal raid card and if so which one? Or is an internal raid just a dumb idea in the fist place?
Peter Tours
TnT Video Services, Inc.
Fort Lauderdale, FL -
Cal Digit makes an internal RAID card that is 1 billion times more reliable than the Apple (LSI Logic) card. But Cal Digit (and everyone else) makes wonderful external arrays, that NEVER develop the problems that you have experienced. In the mean time, you can forget the RAID, and simply use RAID 0, with the native host SATA ports in your MAC Pro, using the simple Apple Disk Utility to create a RAID 0 (which is totally reliable until a drive fails).
Want some suggestions for an external drive array – this is easy – look to your left, and look to your right, EVERY manufacturer that you see advertising on Creative Cow is better than the native Apple product. And the worst of these manufacturers is better than the 19 year old kid at the Apple Store mall store that you go to, to get your current problems resolved.
Bob Zelin
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So that begs the question, why do a hardware raid at all, if you can do a software raid? I always use Raid 0 and back up to externals several times a day.
Peter Tours
TnT Video Services, Inc.
Fort Lauderdale, FL -
Peter, the important part is that you`ve now switched something that brings practicality and success. RAID 0 has the advantage that it lightens the load on the hard drives environment until you gain what you would have wanted in RAID 1 (or 5, etc.); Practical editing with no mentional mistakes or common crashes. Some of us use RAID 0 + 1, RAID 5 etc., because biggy projects and work loads (Make that, big next steps thoughtlessly piled up waiting to be done) like days of NLE waiting to be backed up or done, means that you find out that even your battleship doesn`t like a hurricane. Custom quality RAID cards can offer hardware utilities and other deluxe operations. Bob Zelin is right. Even though you could roll the wagon a few more miles before your next fire by cementing a heat sink on each interface chip on the Apple RAID card, that`s desperation. A few more miles is only a few more miles.
So that begs the question, why do a hardware raid at all, if you can do a software raid? I always use Raid 0 and back up to externals several times a day. -Peter Tours
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Perhaps I have been unclear, and for that I apologize.
When I purchased my 2008 BTO Mac Pro, I ordered 4 x 1tb drives and the brand new Apple Raid Card. Previously I had always used SCSI Raids with an ATTO card, but I don’t work there any more. An all-Apple solution sounded like a good idea at the time. I have been editing for over 30 years, and wanted to avoid the Sony-Grass Valley-Ampex-CMX finger pointing that marked tech support for the first half of my career. I figured (wrongly) that Mac internal drives with a Mac interal RAid card and FCP was the best config for me.
I have always used Raid Zero – and have always had a sophisticated reliable backup system in place for redundancy.
In time I went thru 2 Raid cards on the original 2008 Mac Pro but the second one killed the machine all together. Applecare came thru with a brand new 2009 2.93 BTO now with the new 2009 Mac Pro Raid Card – so puter and card are both different.
But the song remains the same!
Peter Tours
TnT Video Services, Inc.
Fort Lauderdale, FL -
Ah! You`re still using an Apple RAID card. What have Bob and I been telling you better? RAID 0 is not redundant. RAID 1 and some other types are. RAID 0 is data split in parallels. RAID 1 is data duplicated in parallels. Etc. Since you back up more than once per editing day and don`t have mini-crashes in between, RAID 0 is rather successful. Now go out there and get the new RAID card, whether it`s a good one with internal utilities or a new one with software utilities only. I`ll be watching my westward horizon with binoculars for the next smoke trail until you do (much though I`m wishing you better, no hex here). Using internal hard drives instead of external ones is largely a matter of what fans you use to air the CPU box, including the power supply`s one.
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Florida, south-westward.
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If you have a backup system and are diligent about backing up all the time,..then i don’t see why you cannot continue using internal Raid 0.
a. Its faster then Raid 5.
b.If the raid fails, you have your backup.
c. If one or more drives fail then you’re down a “whooping” 100-200 dollars.Simple, cheap.If its not broken don’t fix it. Later on when you have the money and need for a fancy external array that comes with pretty icons/utilities go ahead.I still think they are overpriced. They surely wont make your work any better,..possibly though they can make your life a little easier.
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Peter writes –
I have been editing for over 30 years, and wanted to avoid the Sony-Grass Valley-Ampex-CMX finger pointing that marked tech support for the first half of my career.REPLY –
Peter, do you know when aggrivation with editing (and technology) will be over, so that things are easy – NEVER ! Both you and I will DIE from heart attacks working on some insane nightmare problem, while the client is screaming at us. (Isn’t that why we got into show business in the first place). There is finger pointing INSIDE APPLE, and from their own vendors, so it’s NEVER over. There will always be problems.With that said, you were sold “a bag of goods” when you bought the RAID card – that card exists to create a RAID 5 group with the internal drives. Since you are doing RAID 0 anyway (and backing up), you NEVER needed the RAID card in the first place (only if you were going to do a RAID 5), and Apple gives you RAID 0 for free with the Apple Disk Utility. So if you just plug in 3 drives into the MAC Pro (slots 2,3,4) and open the Apple Disk Utility, you can RAID 0 these drives all together, and have none of this aggrivation. If you ever want RAID 5, get an external raid array from one of the vendors you see advertised on Creative Cow.
I too come from the CMX/Sony/GVG/ADO/Chyron, etc, etc, etc. background. There was grief then, there is grief now, and there will be grief tomorrow.
From the Mel Brooks movie “Spaceballs” – “even in the future, nothing works !”.
Bob Zelin
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