Home

Apple $1000 RAID Card is Bland, Disappointing

Tue, 08/14/2007 - 10:06 — Seth Weintraub

August 7th brought many excellent product updates for the Mac platform but some product lines were sorely overlooked. Mac Pros, for instance, received very mild memory discounts and a surprising $999 RAID card.  This RAID Card isn't the traditional type that has the SATA ports built in.  This one turns the Mac Pro's motherboard SATA ports into something that can be used in a hardware RAID array.

For people in the know on RAID cards, the advantages are plenty. Mirroring (RAID 1) protects you from a hard drive failure. Striping (RAID 0) speeds up the data access speeds of your drives by writing to two drives simultaneously. RAID 5 does a little of both if you have three or more drives. From there, you can go on and on with different configurations and levels to your heart's content.

Another popular Disk Array configuration is JBOD - which stands for "Just a bunch of Disks"  As the name suggests, it is a span of the disks available but it isn't striped so that losing a disk doesn't mess up any data not housed on that disk.  The speed is usually just that of the hard drives.

RAID cards used to be SCSI only, but have filtered down to the IDE and have been on the SATA bus for a little over two years.

Over this time, SATA RAID cards have come way down in price and have added many features that were previously only available to high end SCSI RAID cards. If you want to know everything about SATA RAID cards, check out this article from a few years back - it is essentially a SATA RAID card bible.

OK, now that we know about SATA RAID cards, we have to ask ourselves, how can Apple ask for $1000 for a mid-range, bare-bones SATA RAID card that doesn't even add external ports?

**disclaimer, I have not bought one of these to try it out first hand, nor will I based on the (sparse) specs provided by Apple.  I have used the Xserve model on a few occasions and found it solid, if uninspiring.

So first of all - for you glass half empty people out there - let's talk about what this card lacks:

  1. External ports for external drives
  2. PC Drivers for Boot Camp or removal and using in PCs (see citation 6 in specs - and Virtualization is questionable)
  3. More than 4 Ports that are currently on the motherboard
  4. The specs say nothing about SATA-II
  5. Anywhere close to a reasonable price
  6. It is huge - with a large array of heatsyncs - which means lots of juice needed - so it ain't green
  7. Speed...It is only about 50% faster ON PAPER than just using software RAID on an older Mac Pro 

So there have to be good points about this $1000 SATA RAID card?

  1. It is build to order and has Apple Software and Warranty Support
  2. It has a 72 hour battery (usually a $100 upgrade) and 256 meg cache (standard faire).

Yeah, that's about it. This isn't even as feature rich as the RAID controller on the XServe that is smaller and lets you do SAS in case you still like SCSI. The speed - mediocre for a RAID card - is barely faster than Software RAID. There are no external ports so you can't hook up any external SATA drives without buying another card (or wiring the onboard port cables out through the back) - which is a huge loss for professionals. 

So, for those of you who want solutions, not problems let's look at some alternatives...

On the low end, you can find a number of RAID cards for $150 - $300 which aren't going to be as feature rich and you'll need to check the driver compatibility on Macintosh.

In the midrange,you have a $485 product with MacOSX drivers from HighPoint called the RocketRAID 2340.  This guy packs 16 internal AND External SATA-II ports (downward compatible to SATA 1).  

On the high-end (but still less than the barebones Apple offering), ATTO makes the R348 Adapter for $910.  This card offers SATA, SATA II and SAS (Serial Attatched SCSI) interfaces and speed that will more than likely blow away the Apple product in real world tests.

Still though, Apple will probably do well with this product add-on.  For Sysadmins, it simplifies the ordering/building/warranty process and is probably best adapted and tested by Apple to work with the Mac Pro.  If you are using the Mac Pro as a server - and reliability trumps speed and features, you have more reason to stick with Apple covered products.  Unfortunately, you cannot currently get the Apple Mac Pro RAID card as a stand alone product if you fit into this subset.

Edit: Removed the Adaptec SATA Card because of the lack of driver support for the Mac Platform.  Thanks commentors!

( Filed Under: )

Comments

great review

Tue, 08/14/2007 - 16:41 — macmanager (not verified)

would like to see some real world tests tho.

Adaptec doesn't have Mac drivers and hasn't made any for a while

Tue, 08/14/2007 - 18:11 — realworld (not verified)

Adaptec doesn't have Mac drivers and hasn't made any for a while, so stating these cards as options for Mac OS X would seem strange. Adaptec abandoned the Mac platform in Jan 2004 due to poor management choices.

Thanks

Wed, 08/15/2007 - 03:20 — admin

Updated story based on this. I had used a few Adaptec cards back in the day (and didn't they spin of Roxio?) and assumed they kept making Apple drivers. Corrected!

Reading the specs vs gathering real world Info

Tue, 08/14/2007 - 19:27 — Open your eyes (not verified)

Facts :
1 ) the 4 Sata2 Hdd of the Mac Pro are connected with proprietary cable (Specific plug on the motherboard that gater the 4 connectors)
2 ) The Apple RAID Card do not have any SATA Connector !
It's a pure RAID Processor that "EXTEND" the Motherboard abilities using the proprietary connectiors ON THE MOTHERBOARD
3 ) Apple do not mention there are 2 additionnals SATA ports near the optical Bay, for now, no one have tried them with the Apple RAID card to see if they are supported through the Apple RAID Card, but chances they are are, is 50/50, always because of the software (Apple is an old client in limiting feature through software)

4 ) NO actual Sata RAID card allow the MacPro to sleep or deep sleep

5) the chipset og the Mac Pro could possibly manage SAS disks, Apple choosed to not do so (Workstation vs Server)

6 ) Actually Hard disk technology is limiting the speed, not the connection SATA etc.)
1TB HDD @7200T is too close in performance to justify the price of the 15000T Raptors, not even talking about capacity...

Apple never sold any internall hardware to feed other constructors, so e-Sata Port is not an option untill Apple produce some mini XServeRAID enclosure (they have Fibre Channel and Agregated 2x1GB Ethernet for the Actual XServeRAID + FireWire 800 and in RAID 0 the limit is still not the FireWire800 but again HDD technology)

Chances that normal people can afford Fibre HDD are really low.
SCSI derivatives where promoted/supported by Apple
then demoted on users machine due to the cost/efficiency and sure enough SAS HDD are waaaay too much expensive solution vs a RAID 0 in SATA or even in PATA (XServe RAID, remember?)

5000X motherboard are just beginning to emerge, Quad core Xeon@ 3GHz came public on Intel site just 6 days ago (August 9th)

Check out the picture - IPASS type connector

Tue, 08/28/2007 - 12:27 — screwball (not verified)

If you look close at the picture, the far end appears to have a 4 port SATA type connector. Does this really connect to the motherboard drive connections?

yeah the far end is

Tue, 08/28/2007 - 12:42 — admin

yeah the far end is SATAless. only on the MB

Thanks Seth for the review

Wed, 09/12/2007 - 11:04 — theotherswan (not verified)

Thanks Seth for the review and the recommended card namely the ATTO R348 Adapter. Can I install this card with the MAC Pro (Intel base) internal drives (have 4 of them) since they do not have cables but plugged straight into the motherboard. If not, what are the alternatives for using hardware RAID control. I would have to boot from an external drive of course because no RAID card out there can boot into MAC OS. Any help from anyone is greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot.

Maybe you should use the

Sat, 11/10/2007 - 16:24 — Anonymous Coward (not verified)

Maybe you should use the card before reviewing it.  It will help to prevent you from looking like a moron in the future.

 

The card has an iPass connector on it, when installing the card, you disconnect the drives from the motherboard, and plug them into the RAID card.

how does that go against

Sat, 11/10/2007 - 17:36 — admin

how does that go against anything said in the post?  Also - the review was done over a month before the card was released so it was based on specs only.

 

 

According to user

Sat, 11/17/2007 - 05:43 — Scotty (not verified)

According to user trancepriest on Flickr, this card is a SAS RAID card. That puts it into a whole different league than a S-ATA RAID card. SAS is serial attached SCSI and the interface uses the same connector and cables as the S-ATA. SAS controllers can run both S-ATA and SAS drives.

 

So throw out those slow 7200 RPM S-ATA drives and replace them with 10k or 15k SAS dives!

 

The dissapointment isn't the card, it's Apple's craptastic specs. There is nothing on the site that indicates this is a SAS card. Probably because they don't carry SAS drives and don't want to get anyone worked up about it.

 

Apple seems to only understand one type of disk drive performance: capacity. There's raw speed, and power consumption too. If disk drives were vehicles the three types of performance would be equivalent to: a Greyhound bus (lots of storage), a Ferrari (goes really fast), a compact hybrid (takes little energy). Thus far Apple only allows the Grayhoud bus as their disk drive offering.

 

Let's see if I can link to trancepriest's page, he has a screen shot:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrae/2028138052/in/pool-22294126@N00/

I am surprised with the mis

Wed, 11/21/2007 - 07:34 — Tachion (not verified)

I am surprised with the mis information here.

The RAID card that Apple makes is a SATA RAID card. Period. You put SATA drives in the bays, so you need a SATA RAID card,

The back of the card has a Molex iPass connector. This is the SATA output, it is just using a non-standard connector. This is the same connector that you would plug into the motherboard's SATA subsystem, which also uses an iPass connector.

Yes, the motherboard has 2 additional SATA ports with normal SATA connectors. They are labeled ODD_SATA (Optical Disk Drive) and they are not initialized the same way as the standard SATA ports.

it is also a SAS RAID

Wed, 11/21/2007 - 07:40 — admin

it is also a SAS RAID card.  What is mis-information

A great alternative to Apple's RAID card.

Tue, 04/29/2008 - 13:17 — Kevin Beeman (not verified)

I read through this article with great interest. There is a viable & cheaper alternative to the Apple card that offers everything that the Apple card does, with better rebuild times, more RAID levels, RAID 6 in addition to 0,1,5 & JBOD and connections for 12 external drives as well. This card takes advantage of 4 internal SATA 3Gb/s drives, which are more cost effective than Apple Certified SAS drives, Take a look at this comparison: http://www.caldigit.com/support/RAIDCard.pdf

Once Seth Weintraub has a chance to review our comparison chart, I'm pretty sure that his prayers will be answered with this card.

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
CAPTCHA
This question is used to make sure you are a human visitor and to prevent spam submissions.
Image CAPTCHA
Copy the characters (respecting upper/lower case) from the image.