Mac Pro RAID Card

The Mac Pro RAID Card delivers enhanced storage performance and data protection through a powerful hardware RAID engine, 512MB of cache, and an integrated 72-hour battery for protecting cache data. The card occupies the top PCI Express slot (slot 4) of your Mac Pro (early 2009) and requires Mac OS X v10.5.6 or later.

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3.0

Based on 8 reviews

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$699.00

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Overview

The Mac Pro RAID Card offers improved storage performance and data protection to your Mac Pro system — up to 553MB/s of sequential read performance in RAID 0. Ideal for video and creative professionals with demanding storage needs as well as for tower server applications, this hardware RAID option supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 0+1, and Enhanced JBOD. It has 512MB of cache and an integrated 72-hour battery for protecting the RAID cache. The card occupies the top PCI Express slot (slot 4) and connects to the four internal drive bays.

With the Mac Pro RAID Card installed, high-performance 15,000-rpm SAS drives may be used. SAS drives are sold separately and available with the Promise 450GB SAS Drive for Mac Pro.

To enable your Mac Pro for hardware RAID, install the Mac Pro RAID Card and two or more hard drives in bays 1 through 4. Each RAID level has minimum requirements for the number of hard drives:

RAID LevelDrive RequirementsBenefit
Enhanced JBODOne to four drivesA non-RAID configuration with the ability to migrate to a RAID set at any time
RAID 0 (striping)Two to four hard drivesMaximum performance and capacity for the most demanding I/O requirements
RAID 1 (mirroring)Two hard drivesMaximum protection for critical data
RAID 5Three or four hard drivesData protection, high performance,, and efficient capacity utilization
RAID 0+1Four hard drivesA mirror of striped drive pairs providing performance and data protection

The Mac Pro RAID Card supports the creation of multiple RAID sets in a system and multiple volumes per RAID set. For optimal disk utilization in a RAID set, all hard drives should be the same size. Using Apple's RAID Utility software (included with Mac OS X v10.5), you can migrate the drives into a RAID set without reinstalling Mac OS X or reformatting the drives, and you can customize your RAID volumes to meet your exact requirements.

Requires Mac Pro (early 2009) and Mac OS X v10.5.6 or later.


Please note: The Mac Pro RAID Card occupies the top PCI Express expansion slot (slot 4) and you must have either all SATA or all SAS drives installed.

 

Ratings & Reviews

3.0

Based on 8 reviews

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Most Useful Reviews

  • Mac Pro RAID Card

    1.0
    Do not buy this product.
    • Written by TF from Charlotte
    • Oct 15, 2009

    To start, I've worked with RAID adapters for 10+ years, so I've been around the block with them for quite some time.

    This card in a day-to-day situation will work fine. However, should you suffer a disk failure, it will corrupt your data when it starts to rebuild the array. I've had this happen twice now and the card is coming out of my machine.

    This card is very slow at building an array. +24 hours for a 4 disk array with a usable capacity of 3.57TB. This is very frustrating if you're in a hurry to get the machine up. Most other controllers I've worked with (well, all, actually) are ready for you to start using the volume almost immediately. Not this baby.

    Another issue is that there seems to be a disconnect in apple support with regards to an "enterprise" product being in a consumer product. Beware.

    Stay away from this if you value your data and sanity.     …More

    127 of 139 people found this useful

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  • Mac Pro RAID Card

    1.0
    Fast? Reliable?
    • Written by CE from Houston
    • Aug 21, 2009

    Be prepared to spend a lot of time waiting with no real idea of what's happening if you purchase this finicky card. In the the few weeks since I purchased this card to install in my new 8-core Mac Pro, I've had my machine crash, killing the raid volume. Since getting my computer back from the Apple store (supposedly the card didn't like the drives I'd bought--I bought new ones), I've made several attempts to restore my data from the backup of the pre-crash drive. This wouldn't be so bad if any of the configuration tasks were fast; however, everything having to do with configuring this card takes forever. It takes eight hours to initialize a four 1TB RAID 5 array. Restoring data takes even longer, and I've had that process fail three times. The Apple RAID Utility only provides minimal feedback during these extremely lengthy operations, so you have no idea if anything is happening or if the application is hung. As I write this, I'm trying to delete the existing RAID volume, which is in an uncertain state. This task has been running for an hour so far, and it will probably take six hours to complete. If you are starting from scratch or have just a small amount of data to migrate, this card will probably work fine. (Performance was pretty sweet when it was working.) Otherwise, beware. …More

    93 of 102 people found this useful

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  • Mac Pro RAID Card

    1.0
    Not worth it for HD video edit workstation
    • Written by BO from Ithaca
    • Apr 22, 2011

    We edit HD video/audio using FCP and Adobe Premiere on Mac Pro configured with 4 drives. Bay 1 Applications only; Bay 2 Exports/compressions & media share folder; Bay 3 & 4 are RAID 0. We have learned over the years that this configuration/setup and careful workflow is most efficient for video editing. The Apple RAID card has causes major delays over time with the "battery reconditioning", intermittent "loss of RAID set RSx", and "write cache disabled due to...". The Mac OS X Disk Utility is capable of RAIDing two drives, which is all that is needed on an edit workstation. According to an Apple Tech that I spoke with when we were having our initial problems, the Apple RAID card prefers to be left on 24/7 as if it were in a server... - NOT very Green, Apple- or network security safe. The RAID Utility software has, on a few occasions, disabled our Bay 2 drive when tests with Disk Utility and Drive Genius found the drive to be fully functional. Alas, more wasted time. Not a good purchase.. …More

    29 of 31 people found this useful

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Most Recent Reviews

  • Mac Pro RAID Card

    2.0
    slow
    • Written by AB from Hilversum
    • Sep 17, 2011

    I have 4 SAS discs 15000 connected, highest speed read write is 320 MB

    4 of 7 people found this useful

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  • Mac Pro RAID Card

    1.0
    Not worth it for HD video edit workstation
    • Written by BO from Ithaca
    • Apr 22, 2011

    We edit HD video/audio using FCP and Adobe Premiere on Mac Pro configured with 4 drives. Bay 1 Applications only; Bay 2 Exports/compressions & media share folder; Bay 3 & 4 are RAID 0. We have learned over the years that this configuration/setup and careful workflow is most efficient for video editing. The Apple RAID card has causes major delays over time with the "battery reconditioning", intermittent "loss of RAID set RSx", and "write cache disabled due to...". The Mac OS X Disk Utility is capable of RAIDing two drives, which is all that is needed on an edit workstation. According to an Apple Tech that I spoke with when we were having our initial problems, the Apple RAID card prefers to be left on 24/7 as if it were in a server... - NOT very Green, Apple- or network security safe. The RAID Utility software has, on a few occasions, disabled our Bay 2 drive when tests with Disk Utility and Drive Genius found the drive to be fully functional. Alas, more wasted time. Not a good purchase.. …More

    29 of 31 people found this useful

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  • Mac Pro RAID Card

    5.0
    So far so good!
    • Written by MM from Los Angeles
    • Mar 23, 2011

    I bought this card for use in a Mac Pro (early 2009) that is being used as a file server for a small vfx studio. I installed four 1.5TB drives (not apple brand, btw) and set them up in Raid 5. I then created two volumes out of the Raid - a 20GB startup volume and another volume using the rest of the free space for file sharing over the network (i'm running Snow Leopard Server OS). The installation of the card was very easy and setting up the raid via Apple's raid utility (only for use with a Raid card installed) was great. The card having a backup battery onboard is cool. If you need to setup raid 5 using only internal drives, then you'll need a raid card. I've been using the card for about 3 weeks now and so far it's been great. …More

    1 of 5 people found this useful

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