Mac Pro RAID Card

Reviews for Mac Pro RAID Card

Customer Reviews and Ratings

3.0 out of 5 stars

Based on 17 reviews

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    not worth the money

    • Written by from Montreal

    This RAID Card is always in some state of emergency, always drops the spare drive on a RAID 5, the battery always looses power. I would say maybe I have a dud if I only had one, but I have 2 Servers with these RAID Cards, and both suffer from the same problems...
    Also have a Sonnetech RAID card that we purchased for one tenth the cost, and it's far more reliable then these Apple RAID Cards.

    11 of 11 people found this useful

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  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Flaky and unpredictable

    • Written by from Skillman

    I installed a stack of 10 Xserves with these cards in them in 2008 in a higher ed setting. I kept all software and firmware up to date. I had no catastrophic failures; on the other hand, they kept me busy, and there was considerable irritation. For example, no warning that the batteries of the RAID cards would need replacing every 6 to 12 months and would give undecipherable error messages when starting to run down. Very little reference material on creation and management of RAID sets, aside from the GUI RAID utility, which is not self-explanatory. Documentation was skimpy and written at a simplistic level, with no reference for the command line utilities, error messages, etc. until several years after the card was marketed. I would avoid the Apple RAID card for critical enterprise uses. If used, be disciplined about backups and be prepared to change the battery annually.

    20 of 22 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    When properly installed, works like a charm

    • Written by from Coppell

    When properly installed, works like a charm

    16 of 30 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Perfect RAID 5

    • Written by from Berlin

    Hardware Instal is a litlle bit complicated, follow the instruction guide.
    Software instal is perfectly easy. Function is very well, significant moore speed. using 4 x 1 TB in RAID5.

    13 of 17 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Go completely Raid 0 and your computer is a HD Video Editing Hero

    • Written by from Raleigh

    Keep in mind HD video is the most taxing on your workstation. Having a proper Raid Array Configuration (for HD Video Editing) with this card will make all the difference in the world. The problem is, which path will you choose or the person maintaining your computer. It goes against mainstream, but if you want a happy HD video editing experience, you must completely go Raid 0.

    I have the entire system set to Raid 0. All hard drives are set to this raid array. There is not a single hard drive set otherwise. Performance is great. Stay away from the hard drive partitions specifically for the OS or for any type of "Scratch disk".

    Some may say this is unsafe because if one drive fails you have a mess, but any time any hard drive fails you have a mess - the difference his how big. Some will say other raid configurations are better and safer and that is true for most situations BUT NOT ideal when you are using your system for HD Video Editing.

    The card works fantastic for editing HD video. I've seen a lot of people complaining about this Raid card and I have a feeling it may because not all of the hard drives are set up to Raid 0 acting as one large multi-terabyte drive.

    Take my advice, "Go completely Raid 0 and your Mac Pro is a HD Video Editing Hero", anything else is just an experiment.

    4 of 9 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    not really fast

    • Written by from Hilversum

    I have 4 fast sas discs connected to the raid card,
    and the maximum write and read does not come near "up to 553MB/s".
    I think it's half the speed.
    I shouldn'd have believed the Mac store, they only want to sell, not give the best advice...

    10 of 11 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Unsure of the Confusion here...

    • Written by from Pekin

    I have been in IT my entire life and I think this is a fantastic product. Most RAID controllers need their own set of cables and software, but Apple has managed to make this one plug and play. You plug in your card and battery and that is it. The RAID utility even comes up the first time you boot to the OS! It is not only fast, simple, and solid, it is easy too. I completely disagree about the slowness. I would advise anyone who is having trouble needs to upgrade the firmware of the card, cheek their drives for defects, or buy faster hard drives. A much forgotten understanding of RAID controllers if they are only as fast as the drives plugged into them. If your controller is slow, most of the time your drives are the bottleneck. If you are trying to use SATA hard drives not this controllers, you will not see SAS speeds.

    5 of 10 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Horrible product

    • Written by from Boca Raton

    In my 20 years of computing consulting, we recently came across our first client who has a Mac pro server with this RAID card. we have replaced the card 3 times in 3 months, with similar kernel panics. If we do a time machine on the 4TB volume to USB or to Airport drive the system will lock up. At night once every week or two it just locks up and kernel panics. Its just ridiculous. This is why Apple is so far behind in the enterprise / corporate world. If you own the entire hardware/software platform there is no reason your equipment should fail. Just none.

    14 of 18 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Do not buy this product!

    • Written by from St-Petersburg

    I have this card, and what can i say... it's worst RAID card i even had. It's slow, have only one miniSAS port (only 4 devices), bootable only to Mac OS X, Windows and other OS doesn't works with this card, frequently battery faulting, no sleep function with this card.

    13 of 15 people found this useful

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  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    slow

    • Written by from Hilversum

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

    15 of 20 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Not worth it for HD video edit workstation

    • Written by from Ithaca

    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..

    78 of 81 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    So far so good!

    • Written by from Los Angeles

    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.

    6 of 13 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    This card is FAST and very easy to set up!

    • Written by from Downers Grove

    I read some of the bad reviews and I thought I would put my 2 cents in. I just bought a MacPro-quad core 3.3ghz, 8GB ram. Raid Card and 3 Promise SAS drive. The raid was very easy to set up. I had Raid 0 up and running in a matter of minutes. This machine is very fast. Seems faster then my MacbookPro with an intel SSD. Just my opinion. No specs to back it up.

    The question comes up about mixing SAS and SATA drives & using the internal controller. The internal controller is "gone" once the raid card is installed. I think what happens is all data is routed through the raid card bypassing the internal controller. You "cannot" mix SAS & SATA drives. It has to be all of one type. I'm going to get a eSata card and see if I can externally boot from it. I reason is want to run boot camp and windows. I'm told bootcamp doesn't work with the raid. And I'll use another drive to clone or backup the raid volume via SuperDuper.

    Anyone looking for shear horsepower and speed these Promise drives really deliver. iPhoto with 10's of thousands of photo open almost instantly and I can scroll through the pictures fast in full resolution. The Sata drives just don't do that. Do a little research on how SAS drives work and you probably won't want to use a Sata drive again. You have SSD as an option but they don't have the capacity. If you don't need to capacity then go with SSD.

    Anyway I'm very happy with this set up at the moment.

    29 of 38 people found this useful

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  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    decent card for the price

    • Written by from Canyon Country

    To address the issues of other reviews, yes the rebuilds take a while but this is true of other controllers at this pricepoint such as Adaptec's 5805 card which costs a couple hundred dollars more. The arrays are available while rebuilding a mirrored volume so yes, there's a performance hit during the rebuild but at least your boot/data volumes are available during this process.
    I tested out the failover mode by pulling out a drive while the system was online from a mirrored volume set. I don't recommend doing this as this controller is NOT hot swappable but it recovered fine and the volume was in a critical but useable state. This card is good if it's important to keep your system online 24x7. If you're looking for performance, get a high speed SAS RAID controller and some external drive towers.

    11 of 16 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Do not buy this product.

    • Written by from Charlotte

    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.

    191 of 205 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Fast? Reliable?

    • Written by from Houston

    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.

    140 of 152 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Great Card

    • Written by from TRABUCO CANYON

    Great Card, works great with the 15k SAS drives but only order 3 because of bandwith problems.

    41 of 63 people found this useful

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