RocketRaid & Raid 5

[David Roth weiss]

Warren,

Sorry this doesn’t exactly answer your question, but… You might want to check out the ATTO ExpressSAS R348 and R380 RAID controllers, they are now regarded as the new state of the art.

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
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Los Angeles

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[Warren Eig]

David,

Know all about the R380. Was curious about the eSATA solutions.

Warren

Warren Eig
O 310-470-0905
C 310-560-6245

email: warren@babyboompictures.com
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[Soreyrith Um]

I have a Rocket Raid 2314 card, but I don’t use it in Raid 5 mode. Actually I just use JBOD mode. So I would be interested in hearing about other people’s experience, too.

The Arizona Mac Users Group (AMUG.org) did a test a few months ago, and I remember the results being fairly good.

http://www.HotSpotsOnline.com

[Walter Biscardi]

[Warren] “Was curious about the eSATA solutions.”

SAS is much faster. We have two of the ATTO R380’s running two 8TB SATA arrays and they just scream. Almost 500MB/s running RAID 5.

We have eSATA on the LaCie S2S 1.25TB Arrays. Those run in JBOD and are slower just because they’re only 5 drives vs. 8 but they do run about 125MB/s or so.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

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[Arnie Schlissel]

I used a Rocket Raid 2322 about year or 11 months ago to build an 8 drive RAID 5. The speed is good, but the RAID can be a bit wonky.

If I don’t unmount & power down the RAID before shutting down or restarting, the RAID will sometimes mount with a drive missing. Restarting or poping the missing drive out of the enclosure & back in will bring it back & then the RAID will rebuild. I’ve never lost any data, but it’s a pain & I don’t like it.

I would have preferred the ATTO, but it wasn’t available at the time I needed it. Back then, Highpoint had the only RAID 5 SATA solution for the Mac, so the decision was practically made for me.

Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog

[Kevin Schumacher — email bounces]

I’ve been using a Highpoint 2224 card for two years, and the card has always been configured as a RAID5 array comprised of seven drives; 4-drives are in the external X-4 case and 3-drives are inside my Mac.

I’ve had four ‘incidents’ when the drive connected to channel 7 (in the X-4 external case) drops off the bus, for no apparent reason, and the 2224 card sees this and sounds it’s alarm.

Within minutes, the drive (at channel 7) re-appears on the bus, and the 2224 card begins rebuilding the RAID5 array. During this time, I’ve logged into the web browser and confirmed this sequence of events in the Event Log (showing the channel 7 drive missing, then re-appearing)…and in the Manage Array window (showing the Status as “Critical”, and re-building.

[Clay Stockwell]

The Maxtor 7v300F0 is not on the compatible drive list.

https://www.hptmac.com/US/productfiles/compatibility/RocketRAID%20Hard%20Drive%20Compatibility%20List.pdf

Also–in case it applies to you–read this from http://www.macgurus.com

“A word about OEM versus Retail Drives MacGurus’ strongly recommends that our customers avoid purchasing drives marketed as OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) hard drives. We suggest that you stick always with Retail labeled drives. Retail drives carry the retail manufacturer’s warranty, 3 to 5 years, with all the contractual support that the warranty provides. OEM drives were originally manufactured for one of the many major manufacturers of computers and or servers. OEM drives do not carry a warranty from the drive manufacturer nor from the OEM buyer. Instead they are sold to resellers ‘as is’ and any warranty is provided by the reseller. Worse yet, these drives may have custom firmware as specified by the OEM. We frequently see customers with OEM market drives have compatibility problems in desktop usage. There is just no way to know what you are getting when you purchase OEM drives and warranty coverage is hit or miss depending on the source. MacGurus ONLY sells Retail drives.”

I’m with you on this, by-the-way. I have a HighPoint card having the same issues (just purchased it). I also bought OEM drives that were not on the compatibility list… If there’s any saving grace, the company I bought the drives from said they were compatible with the HighPoint cards.

If I were to read the MacGurus with a a discerning eye, I’d say that some drives will work and some won’t. There are too many variable. I could plug in an identical drive from the re-seller and it may actually work…and another may not.

I’m curious what will happen if the drive re-seller will let me exchange the drives they told me were compatible with some that ARE on the list. I’ll let you know how it goes.

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Kevin Schumacher] “I’m thinking of giving the Areca 1680 a try”

Areca is finally supporting Mac OS X? A year ago they weren’t supporting the Mac on these type of products.

Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog

[Clay Stockwell]

Just for reference:

https://www.barefeats.com/hard89.html

[Sean Oneil]

I used a 2224 with an 8 disk RAID 5 for a long time.

At first I had the issue of a drive disappearing and the alarm going off. I updated the firmware and it never happened again.

I got about 450 MB/s read, and about 200 MB/s write (RAID-5 always has much slower write speeds).

I also want to make sure everyone knows that SAS does not provide any speed benefits over SATA. SAS is a faster bus, but that means nothing since the bottleneck is always the disk drive itself – not the bus. SATA is still many, many times faster than any hard drive ever invented.