[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

[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

[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.