PCI Express Storage solutions

[Bob Zelin]

as of this moment, there are no PCIe SATA cards. I am sure that they are all coming, but the ONLY storage card for MAC’s that is PCIe is the Apple FC Card for PCIe buss.
As you stated, the UL5D is COMING OUT – but you know that it will take time. Same for Sonnet, Firmtek, Highpoint, Initio, and all the others. Believe me, they want to stay in business, but Apple is not interested in helping it’s “business partners”
be ready for their new hardware. This applies to all MAC products in all industries, like the print and publishing business – so don’t think that its only Blackmagic customers that are being punished.

Gee – maybe Apple WANTS to sell more storage products (fat chance).

My advice – stick with your PCI-X hardware, and WAIT for the flood of PCIe products that will appear in the next few months. Don’t be the first kid on the block.

Bob Zelin

[Nico Sandhof]

RocketRAID 2320 PCI Express

https://www.highpoint-tech.com/

mac-driver: https://www.highpoint-tech.com/BIOS%20+%20Driver/rr2320/Mac/

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Nico –
I am very impressed with your research. The link you posted in fact has the MAC driver, but NONE of the Highpoint literature or charts indicate that they have ANY support for Macintosh for this product -see below – (I would love to know how you found this link). ——

The RocketRAID 2320 supports advanced RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, and JBOD for maximum configuration flexibility. HighPoint offers the broadest range of support for all major operating systems to ensure OS and hardware server compatibility.

Drivers are available for all major operating systems, including Windows, Linux, FreeBSD. Open source is also provided for Linux and FreeBSD.

Specification
Host Side Interface PCI Express X4 (X8 slot compatible)
Device Interface
Serial ATA
Number of Channels
8 Device Channels
Allowed Disk Connection
8 SATA II or SATA I hard disks
Supported RAID Levels
RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, JBOD
Operating Systems Support Windows, Windows X64 Editions, Linux(opensource), FreeBSD(opensource)
RAID Management Tool BIOS
Browser-based RAID Management
CLI
Some Highlighted Features
Hot swap/hot spare
Single RAID Cross Adapter 64-bit
LBA support for over 2TB support
Drive activity / Failed LED
SAF-TE chassis management
SMTP support for email notification

[S12345]

Bob – agreed about no reference to Mac OS except of course the large lettering on the home page – “The Fastest RAID 5 SATA II Solution doe PC’s and Power Mac G5”

[Gary Taylor]

They prominently display Mac support for this card but like you said in the detailed description they don’t mention the Mac. I think that might have something to do with the card only having internal ports. Makes it a not starter for me, and anyone else who wants more than 2 drives on a Mac. Hopefully they will release a PCI-e version the 2224 or 2240 soon. Those multilane cables sound very interesting.
Gary

[Eric Pratt]

FYI, this unit will connect 8 internal sata ports to a single external box maintaining sata all the way through: https://www.blueraid.com Would work well with the rocketraid 2320 or other internal 8 port sata controllers.

Eric Pratt
http://www.virtualsetworks.com

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Eric,
That looks very interesting. Are you using one of these cards? I am curious about how you get the infiniband cables out of a G5 since to card doesn’t have an external connector. Do you know how hard it would be to disconnent the RAID and reattach it? Those are some pretty awesome benchmarks they posting using the onboard SATA from that motherboard.
Thanks,
Gary

[Bob Zelin]

these are great questions, and if you have ever used a Highpoint SATA card, you might already know the disappointing answers. Any 8 port SATA configuration (from ProMax, etc.) will have the same specs.

Bob Zelin

[Eric Pratt]

I’m getting the card tomorrow, so I’ll post back here by friday.

Eric Pratt
http://www.virtualsetworks.com

[Eric Pratt]

I got in the 2320 and hooked it up to my BlueRAID and I’m getting 487Mb/s sequential writes, of course the disk is empty though. I do have some issue going on though, I only have 2Tb, not 2.8 as I should losing a disks worth to the RAID 5 parity scheme. I know a few percent is lost to formating but 800Gb is more than reasonable. Otherwise though, the thoughput looks good, especially for RAID 5.

Eric Pratt
http://www.virtualsetworks.com