RocketRaid & Raid 5

[Kevin Schumacher — email bounces]

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

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

Here’s the link to Areca’s website listing compatibility:

https://www.areca.us/products/pcietosas1680series.htm

And here’s the link to BareFeats.com test of the Areca 1680 on a MacPro:

https://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/areca/1680x/

Here’s the opening description from the review:

Areca is shipping the ARC-1680x external dual mini-SAS, PCI-Express to SAS RAID Host Adapter ($845). This SAS controller supports RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 30, 50, 60 or JBOD and also features hot spare support. The ARC-1680x SAS controller supports up to eight SAS ports using an 800 MHz Intel IOP348 I/O processor, 256MB of on-board DDR333 533 MHz SDRAM memory with ECC protection and an optimized RAID engine to support extreme RAID 6 performance. The ARC-1680x PCIe to SAS RAID host adapter can support up to 128 devices using SAS expanders. This feature provides SAS controllers with the flexibility to interface with many more hard disks than traditional direct connect SATA host adapters.

The ARC-1680x supports a Command Line Interface (CLI) and includes a browser-based management tool for easy configuration. The controller features an alarm and SMTP email notification should a hard drive failure occur. The purpose of this article is to determine how the Areca ARC-1680x will perform with the Apple Mac Pro.

And thanks, Clay; I was aware that the 7V300F0 drives were not on HighPoint’s compatibility list, and decided to take a chance anyway…I don’t know if the drive’s firmware is ‘custom’ or not, but they’ve worked 95% of the time perfectly, which is why it’s so frustrating when…for no apparent reason, a drive will drop off the bus & reappear – triggering a ‘degraded’ array alert and necessitating a rebuild operation that takes about two hours for a 2TB system.

I guess the good news is this hasn’t happened in two months now…

Cheers, Kevin

[David Roth weiss]

[Clay] “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.”

Clay,

Sorry, its not your fault for reprinting this, but that is complete bunk. Apparently MacGurus is not able to compete with the big Internet discounters, so they pass on this myth as a way to sell people the very same hard drives they could obtain from a discounter, but at inflated prices.

You can check it out for yourself by calling any reputable reseller such as Newegg and asking about the warranty on any OEM drive they sell and then confirming the warranty with their suppliers such as Maxtor, Hitachi, or Seagate. Newegg sells hundreds of thousands of OEM drives and all are covered by the manufacturer’s warranty, either 3, 4, or five years depending on the brand and drive type.

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Clay Stockwell]

David

Thanks for the reply. I agree with your sentiments regarding the warranty–otherwise I wouldn’t have purchased the drives. That part is indeed bunk. I wish I’d left out the first two sentences from my cut and past…I guess I should have.

I thought the relevant passage was about custom firmware for the OEM’s. That may cause compatibility issues the RAID card manufacturer couldn’t anticipate. Honestly I’m just looking for a solution myself. If I put in a hard drive HighPoint recommends will my card work? That’s what I’m trying to figure out…without going broke trying to find out!

[David Roth weiss]

[Clay] “Honestly I’m just looking for a solution myself. If I put in a hard drive HighPoint recommends will my card work?”

My own experience with other manufacturers is that you absolutely must stick with their recommendations.

As you mentioned earlier, small deviations in the firmware instruction set can often bring harddrive subsystems to there knees or at least make them have the occasional disasterous hiccup. Hard drive subsystems are designed to be mission critical and so staying completely within the manufactures specifications is really the only way to insure your system will behave as the manufacturer intended.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Arnie Schlissel]

Thanks, Kevin!

It’s good that there’s finally some real choices for SATA/SAS RAID controllers on the Mac side. A year ago, this was simply not the case.

BTW, when I was researching & shopping last year, I called ATTO, and spoke at lenght with someone fairly senior regarding the R380. I can’t recall now if it was the product manager or a senior development engineer, but I was very impressed at the time that someone that senior had bothered to return a call about a product that wasn’t even on the market yet.

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

[Walter Biscardi]

[Sean ONeil] ”

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

Wow, that’s strange. Our Write speeds are higher than the Read speeds. One test was 517MB/s Write / 388 Read and after we adjusted the unit, 420MB/s Write / 340 Read. This is running the Atto R380 SAS card.

[Sean ONeil] “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.”

It’s a much more robust connection, like Fibre Channel. The SATA connections sometimes feel like the cables are about to pull out. The SAS connectors are larger and lock into place. I personally prefer the SAS connectors over the SATA connections.

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

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Kevin Schumacher — email bounces]

[Sean ONeil] “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.”

[walterbiscardi] It’s a much more robust connection, like Fibre Channel. The SATA connections sometimes feel like the cables are about to pull out. The SAS connectors are larger and lock into place. I personally prefer the SAS connectors over the SATA connections.

Both my HighPoint cards (2224 and the 2322) use the same connector, a mini-SAS, and are very secure, as is the cabling; the only difference is that one uses a latching style lock and the other uses screws.

The ProAvio E8-ML enclosure (with the optional redundant power supply) houses the eight Maxtor drives, and the only thing I don’t like about it – is that it’s LOUD…too loud to have in the edit bay.

Cheers, Kevin

[Sean Oneil]

[Kevin Schumacher] “Both my HighPoint cards (2224 and the 2322) use the same connector, a mini-SAS, and are very secure, as is the cabling; the only difference is that one uses a latching style lock and the other uses screws.”

Very true. Tons of SATA cards and enclosures use the same Infiniband and mini-SAS connections that SAS cards use.

I just don’t see any advantage to using SAS. You can find “enterprise quality” SATA drives that are just as reliable. Yes, they make 15k RPM SAS drives (SATA only goes to 10k), but the capacity is very low. And at that point, why not just get Solid State Drives?

[Sean Oneil]

[walter biscardi] “Wow, that’s strange. Our Write speeds are higher than the Read speeds. One test was 517MB/s Write / 388 Read and after we adjusted the unit, 420MB/s Write / 340 Read. This is running the Atto R380 SAS card.”

I think your results are much stranger :). I have a lot of different RAID-5 solutions. Read speed is always at least twice as fast. When you write to a RAID-5, it has to write not only the data, but also the additional parity data (what’s used to rebuild it if you lose a disk). But when you read from it, it’s just like reading from a RAID-0.

You could have filesystem caching turned on during your speed tests. That would explain the faster write speed.