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X-RAID speed upgrades?
My media drive for the past 3.5 years has been a 5.7 TB X-RAID array. I have it formatted as two RAID-5 arrays and then software striped together with RAID-0 to get a RAID-50. Formatted that yields 4.4 TB, or 4.0 TB of usable space. It’s been very reliable – none of the drives or controllers have died yet. But I’m wondering if there’s a way to upgrade for more speed. Will an upgrade to the controllers do anything (assuming there’s an upgrade available)? If I put in faster 1 TB or 2 TB drives to replace the 400 GB drives in it now, can I upgrade just a couple of drives at a time or do the upgrades have to be to half or all drives? How much of a speed increase could I gain on this X-RAID?
Also, can someone post a link to the best way to partition an X-RAID in regards to block sizes etc., and also a link to more detailed info about the maintenance routines in RAID Admin?
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3 Replies
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Brad,
No part of the Apple Xserve RAID can be upgraded. The sleds have proprietary firmware on the drives and the controllers were never speed bumped.
Don’t waste the money on that old tech…
Torrey
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Torrey Loomis
President & CEO – Silverado Systems, Inc.
(916) 760-0032 • FAX (916) 404-5258
torrey@silverado.cc
https://www.Silverado.ccSilverado Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/silveradosys
StudioBuilder blog at https://silveradosys.blogspot.com -
Upgrade Controllers= Nope, there are no upgrades from Apple to do this.
Upgrade Drives= Possibly but will be hard to find. The X-raid only uses PATA drives which are hard to come by and the largest we found recently were 500GBs. 750s which were the largest are no longer being made not sure you will even 500s we looked hard and finally found some last year.
Your best bet is purchase a new SATA or SAS drive Array. We bought a Sans Digital 8bay storage with 1.5 TB drives with RAID5 via Highpoint Card. 12TB RAID5 machine for under $2,000 that’s 2x as fast as our X-Serve RAID.
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Brad,
Apple no longer makes this raid. I wouldn’t put any money into it trying to upgrade, since there are plenty of newer models that have connectivity speeds and through put speeds that the old Apple X-Raid will NEVER touch.
Check out “Activestorage”. THey have a forum here on the cow. or go to:
https://www.getactivestorage.com
Raid storage is one area that has been changing very rapidly. Anything more than a couple of years old will really be at a disadvantage compared to newer models available now. Bite the bullet on this one, and go for new.
Mark
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