Apple X-Raid SAN

[Bob Zelin]

you write –
I have been asked to re-install an Apple X-Raid via fibre on a G5. I re-connected all the fibre channels and ethernet connections. When I open the Raid Admin, I can see that all the connections are up. The fibre channels seem to be working fine; the only problem is that the drives won’t mount on my desktop. When I launch the fibre channel utility, I get a message saying “No Apple Fibre Channel Card found”. This strikes me as odd simply because I can see the connections light up. Also, when I open disk utility, I can see the partitions but a few of them have an “offline” warning and others a “failed” warning. I would like to save the information on the drives, but it is not important. Do I need to perform a format?

REPLY –
1) the Apple XServe RAID is an inferior product and now obsolete.
2) you have an old system – the G5 and the XServe RAID.
3) the experts are on the Creative Cow XSAN forum
4) to monitor the full XServe RAID, you need to connect BOTH ethernet ports of the XServe RAID to your MAC G5 via a simple Ethernet switch or hub – one ethernet connection is not enough.
5) did you load the Apple FC card driver (download it from the web).
6) go into RAID Admin, delete the RAID group, and recreate your RAID. If you need passwords – your general password is “public”, and your advanced password is “private”. It will take over 24 hours to recreate a RAID 5 group on the XServe RAID. You will create two 7 drive RAID 5 groups, and ultimately stripe these two together via the Apple Disk Utility RAID 0. This is called RAID 50. If you can’t create the Raid groups, you probably have a bad drive (or more than one bad drive). Parallel ATA drives from Hitachi are not easy to find these days. Apple will probably be little help to you.

BTW…Also getting a message saying that the upper blower is not installed. This thing is blowing up in my face!!! NEED HELP!

REPLY – do you have both ethernet ports plugged into a common ethernet switch, and also your G5 ethernet port as well ? You want to see both controllers on the RAID Admin, not just one.

Bob Zelin

[Jordan Woods]

reseat the upper blower. if it still won’t come online… it’s dead. this doesn’t surprise me on old equipment.

you need to check your fibre card as well. maybe change PCI slots. is it an Apple LSI card… etc—

[Jaime Quintana]

Ok…alas the gods have smiled upon me and i have been given a budget to set up a new fibre network with new drives. I am in the process of formatting the Apple X-Raid and looking to replace it with the G-Speed FC 24 TB 4gb/s. The plan is to get a Q-Logic fibre switch and have this connected to 2 other suites. In reference to the x-raid, will I be able to hook up a 2gb/s drive to this network of 4gb/s? Might seem like a dumb question, just weighing all my options. If not, is there a way to do this? The idea is to get as much storage as possible for editing and still be able to use the storage we have for archiving. I am open to any suggestions. Thanks.