Mac Pro RAID card boot/Bootcamp questions

[Sean Oneil]

[Saddler] “1. Is it possible to make this array the boot installation?

2. Can Windows be installed on a partition of the aforementioned RAID-5 array using Boot Camp?

3. Will Windows be able to see my X-Serve RAID-50 array via the fibre channel card?

4. Will there be any slot arrangement issues with installing an 8800 GT graphics card, a Kona 3 capture card, the RAID card, and the fibre channel card? I had read somewhere that the raid card required moving the graphics card to a slower slot or something like that.”

1. Bad idea. System disk and media disk should not be the same. Software RAID-5 for a system disk is also a bad idea. FYI there are two extra SATA ports on a Mac Pro’s motherboard. You can mount drives 5 and 6 in the optical bay with a cheap kit. Just a warning though, Boot Camp doesn’t recognize these two extra ports.

2. 99% certain, no. No way. Don’t even try it.

3. If there are Windows drivers for your card then yes it can work. LSI makes the Apple FC card. Google the topic and find someone who’s done it. You’ll need MacDrive software to use HFS+ drives in Windows.

4. Two of those cards will be limited to x4 lane. For the Kona that doesn’t matter. For the FC or RAID card it will probably cause a bottleneck.

[Sean Oneil]

By the way. The Apple RAID card is a lousy deal. Nobody here uses it I don’t think. Check the banner ads on the left. Much better products.

What is this for anyways? You have an Xserve RAID so what do you need an internal RAID-5 for? I’m just curious.

[Brad Bussé]

Sean, thank you for taking the time to share your knowledge, it’s very helpful. Based on your responses I’m going to skip the internal RAID. My idea was that it would be an easy way to provide redundancy for my boot drives to minimize down time if a drive fails, while also providing extra speed as a side benefit. I use my X-serve RAID for my media, but I really wanted the extra space since my X-Serve RAID is constantly getting full and I want to be able to offload projects that I still need to be online, but are less urgent, over to the internal RAID. I figured it would be fast transfers moving projects between the two RAIDs, and I wouldn’t be loosing the redundancy protecting my data. I’ll probably just make my internal drives be a single Mac boot, a single Windows boot, and a software RAID-1 of the other 2-4 drives. Will I take a large CPU hit for running two software RAID arrays (the other being the RAID-0 part of my RAID-50 X-serve RAID)? Then I guess for backup of my system drive, I could use Time Machine, but I haven’t yet upgraded to Leopard so I’m not sure how well it works yet.

That’s great news about the FC card having Windows drivers available, I’ll hunt that down and give it a shot.

[Brad Bussé]

Oh, one more question too; if I get the driver to let Windows see my FC card, is there any way to get windows to recognize a software RAID, because my X-Serve RAID is two RAID-5s striped together with software using RAID-0?

[Sean Oneil]

[Saddler] “Oh, one more question too; if I get the driver to let Windows see my FC card, is there any way to get windows to recognize a software RAID, because my X-Serve RAID is two RAID-5s striped together with software using RAID-0? “

MacDrive supposedly supports Apple software RAID. I’ve never tried it myself but it’s supposed to work.

[Sean Oneil]

I don’t think software RAID-1 and RAID-0 eat up very much CPU.