Reviews for Mac Pro RAID Card

When properly installed, works like a charm

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.

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.

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.

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..

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.

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.

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