Raid5 setup on Mac Pro internal 4 drives

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Matthew Chevalier] “is it possible to setup my mac pro (2×3 Ghz Quad-core Intel Xeon ) (2008) with a RAID5 startup disk using the 4 internal bays.”

According to this, a Mac Pro RAID Card does exactly that – but it’s for “early 2009” models or later. Not sure if it’s available for your Mac Pro.

Automatic rebuild (once you replace a failed drive) is a fairly standard feature of RAID5 controllers – but haven’t looked into the docs deep enough to see if this one does it.

The installation is not for the faint of heart – requires re-routing cables assemblies on the motherboard:

https://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/MacPro_RAIDCard_Installation.pdf

You may be better off with RAID1 using Mac OSX.

Alex
DV411

[Michael Kammes]

This is a little off topic, but…

What about getting an 2 SSD drives in bay 1 & 2, and RAID that as mirrored (giving you full redundancy), then use standard HDDs in Slot 3 and 4? The SSD Raid will give you the performance of 4 standard HDDs (if not betetr) AND you get extra slots for storage. You could even go with 1 SSD drive and use Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner to create a fully bootable backup.

~Michael

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[Jon Schilling]

Have you guys checked this out? Although not RAID 5 (as it’s only 2 drives) could be an option….

https://www.stardom-usa.com/pro_drive_feature.html

We offer 2 different models:

Pro Drive PD 2510 is RAID 1 – 2 X SSD or 2.5″ hard drive
and Pro Drive PD 2520 is RAID 0 – 2 X SSD or 2.5″ hard drive also has a FW 800 & USB 2.0 connection for “off site” use.

That’s 2 X SSD or 2.5″ hard drives in a 3.5″ bat on your Mac Pro.

Take a look.

Jon

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Michael Kammes] “What about getting an 2 SSD drives in bay 1 & 2, and RAID that as mirrored (giving you full redundancy), then use standard HDDs in Slot 3 and 4?”

That’s a cool setup – about the best balance of performance, redundancy and capacity. The original poster seemingly wanted to get the maximum redundant capacity out of internal drives, and RAID5 is the only way to do it.

Stardom Pro Drive PD 2510 (2x SSD in RAID1) goes a step further putting two 2.5″ drives in one bay and hardware-mirroring (or striping) them.

If the budget allows, I’d rather not do a RAID5 on fewer than 6 drives – and then, I’d really prefer RAID6 on 8+. RAID5 is risky: it makes drives work too hard, and then when a drive fails, the load increases dramatically during rebuild. It’s fine for SSDs, but spinning drives are more likely to have another failure during rebuild, and then your data is really kaput.

So on mission critical data, it’s RAID6 – or RAID5 with daily backups.

Alex
DV411