Q about SATA and SAS on new Mac Pro... [Archive]

Jeff Kilgroe

01-28-2008, 09:44 PM

OK, here's a question I can't seem to find an answer to: The Mac Pro has two unused SATA connections on the mainboard. Do these connections become effectively disabled (like the 4 serving the internal HDD bays) when using the RAID card in SAS mode? I'm assuming they remain active as they're on their own channel or on the same as the two optical bays.

Or when operating in SAS mode for the 4 HDD bays, is it possible to attach a 5th SAS drive if it were mounted via a 5.25" to 3.5" bracket into an open optical drive bay?

Asking these questions here is probably a long-shot, but I can't seem to find the answers I'm looking for, but didn't want to buy 5 SAS drives just to try it out... And I haven't got the new Mac Pro yet, I'm still waiting on that 8800GT card.

Martin Drew

01-29-2008, 06:01 AM

Sorry didn't read the question properly so I have deleted my answer so as not to appear stupid. :)

M

J. Bernard Vallon

01-29-2008, 07:15 PM

someone posted this a few days ago and i bookmarked it...

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/MPQXES2/

Seems like as good idea as any to make use of them.

Edit: I just realized I did the same thing Martin did, and i answered a different question. I'm not sure Jeff, that is a good question.

Alexander Christ

01-30-2008, 12:58 AM

Jeff Kilgroe

01-30-2008, 06:59 AM

AFAIK the two SATA connections on the mainboard remain active, they are labeled ODD_SATA and probably designed for an upcoming SATA Optical Disk Drive (Blue-Ray?). They're not standard SATA ports, neither hot swappable nor Port Multiplier and not visible under Bootcamp.

Thank you, that is very helpful -- the ODD_SATA label does suggest their intention of using these with the optical bays.

You can mount a 5th SATA drive into an optical drive bay with an adapter, but it should not work for SAS as the ODD_SATA is SATA only.

Kinda figured that. Does the RAID card support more than 4 connected SAS devices when in SAS mode? ...Anyone? Reason I'm asking is I'm thinking of using a 15Krpm 300GB SAS as my system drive and placing it in the second optical bay and then loading the 4 HDD bays with 500GB 10Krpm SAS drives in a RAID-5.

Probably more brain damage and expense than it's worth. Especially since the 500GB/10K drives are still considered evaluation product for the next couple months.

I'll probably just go back to the original plan of a fast SATA drive for the boot/application drive and then internal storage and workspace would be 3 x 750GB or 1TB drives in a RAID-0 or maybe a RAID-5. Going SAS for internal storage would only give me half as much space anyway, and the SATA drives are still plenty fast...

Alexander Christ

01-30-2008, 08:43 AM

Does the RAID card support more than 4 connected SAS devices when in SAS mode? ...Anyone? ...

It supports only 4 SAS or SATA drives.

I'm also getting the new Mac Pro. I consider to add a 8-bay RAID 5 by installing a RAID card in the Mac Pro (not the Apple one) and a 8-bay SATA hard drive enclosure connected with 2x Mini SAS. In the Mac Pro one SATA drive for the OS and one for programs, backup with internal Raid 1 or external drives (FW800 or SATA).

Jeff Kilgroe

01-30-2008, 09:50 AM

Yeah, that might be a solution too... I'll keep thinking on it.

Chase Gordon

02-16-2008, 11:22 PM

Jeff Kilgroe

02-17-2008, 08:44 AM

I've been giving this issue a lot of thought (maybe too much). To answer the original question, I haven't tried it, but nothing in my research suggests the motherboard SATA ports are affected by the RAID card. It is highly unlikely you can run SAS through them, but you should still be able to run SATA through them.

Thanks for the response, Chase. :) I have actually learned quite a bit since posting the original question and since my last post to this thread. The two onboard SATA ports have been confirmed to be for the optical bays or other future expansion. The RAID card does not affect or alter their operation. These SATA ports are bootable and fully functional.

The Mac Pro RAID card only supports 4 drives. I'm getting it because I believe putting the OS on a 15K SAS drive will help immensely, since the OS is doing bazillions of small reads and writes all the time. For my purposes, I also believe a pair of 7200 RPM SATA drives in RAID 0 will do for internal

If you use the Apple RAID card to run a SAS drive, it converts all 4 primary drive bays into SAS operation. You can't mix and match SATA and SAS within the 4 drive bays in a Mac Pro without running separate cables from somewhere else. For your situation, you may want to use a cheaper SAS controller like the HighPoint 2322 to create a bootable SAS volume and then leave the remaining 3 internal bays for a SATA RAID. Or you can use all 4 and mount your boot drive in one of the optical bays if you leave one empty. There are brackets out there to mount two 3.5" drives in a 5.25" bay in the Mac Pro, so that could be a useful solution.

I think the main problem is that it takes up the only other high speed PCIe slot, so you can't put another card in to get high bandwidth external access.

PCI-e lane assignments are configurable on the Mac Pro... I'm not sure to what extent on the Jan '08 models and I don't know if the Apple RAID card requires 8 lanes or 4 lanes (should only need 4). I don't have my system yet to play with this and I have yet to find anyone who actually knows the answer to that question.

Chase Gordon

02-17-2008, 12:17 PM

If you use the Apple RAID card to run a SAS drive, it converts all 4 primary drive bays into SAS operation. You can't mix and match SATA and SAS within the 4 drive bays in a Mac Pro without running separate cables from somewhere else.

SAS and SATA are plug compatible with the intention that any SAS controller can also operate SATA drives. According to a MacInTouch reader (click here) (http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/macpro/topic4359.html#d19jan2008) this is true of the Mac Pro RAID card as well, and although at the moment Apple doesn't officially support mixing SAS and SATA, I think that's just to avoid confusion when people try to migrate volumes and RAID arrays across incompatible technologies. (You can't build a RAID 0 with one SATA and one SAS drive, for example.)

For your situation, you may want to use a cheaper SAS controller like the HighPoint 2322 to create a bootable SAS volume and then leave the remaining 3 internal bays for a SATA RAID.

According to AMUG (click here) (http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/highpoint/2322/), you CANNOT boot from the HighPoint 2322, nor is it configured to support internal drives. So that won't work. If I could find a bootable internal SAS card for cheap, I'd buy it, and leave the RAID 0 to software. I could get the ATTO R348, but it's $1,100, and even then, since it doesn't take over the internal cables in the Mac Pro, I can't use the nicely designed, "official" drive bays. So even if it's bootable (of which I'm not sure), I'd now need to cough up extra for an external enclosure (I want to reserve the optical drive bay for a Blu-Ray drive.)

Jeff Kilgroe

02-17-2008, 06:54 PM

this is true of the Mac Pro RAID card as well, and although at the moment Apple doesn't officially support mixing SAS and SATA, I think that's just to avoid confusion when people try to migrate volumes and RAID arrays across incompatible technologies.

I hope you're right and I'm definitely hoping for mixed mode support with the Apple RAID card. However, several Apple techs have told me that it simply does not support mixed interfaces, it's one or the other. My new Mac Pro should be here tuesday. I will attempt using a 15krpm SAS drive with 3x1TB SATA in a RAID-5. I'd like it to work, and it should work, but I'm not convinced that it will.

According to AMUG (click here) (http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/highpoint/2322/), you CANNOT boot from the HighPoint 2322, nor is it configured to support internal drives. So that won't work. If I could find a bootable internal SAS card for cheap, I'd buy it, and leave the RAID 0 to software.

Sorry, try the HighPoint 2340. I've got my numbers crossed -- looking at too many options lately between tape backup solutions and other things. I'm trying to get confirmation that it's bootable under OSX. I've got conflicting information on that from different people at HighPoint. So I don't know, and I'm not sure I want to spend the money to find out. I really don't need the boot ability, especially if the Apple RAID card supports mixed SAS and SATA configs. The highpoint 2322 is my current favorite HBA at $270 for connecting to an external LTO drive.

Chase Gordon

02-18-2008, 03:51 AM

I hope you're right and I'm definitely hoping for mixed mode support with the Apple RAID card. However, several Apple techs have told me that it simply does not support mixed interfaces, it's one or the other. My new Mac Pro should be here tuesday. I will attempt using a 15krpm SAS drive with 3x1TB SATA in a RAID-5. I'd like it to work, and it should work, but I'm not convinced that it will.

Please let us all know (and please PM me as well) when you find out. My new Mac Pro won't get here until next week, but I'll send the RAID card (and the SAS drive) back if it doesn't support mixed modes. FWIW, the Apple Genius I talked to today said, when I asked about mixed mode support, "officially, it doesn't support mixing, and I could get in trouble for giving out unofficial information." To me that sounds like confirmation mixed-mode is supported.

Sorry, try the HighPoint 2340. I've got my numbers crossed -- looking at too many options lately between tape backup solutions and other things. I'm trying to get confirmation that it's bootable under OSX.
That, too, is a SATA card. If you want to boot off SATA, you don't need a card. Of course you and I have different needs and desires, but for me, it's having a bootable SAS drive that is what I'm looking for more than a SATA RAID 5. If you just want a hardware SATA RAID in addition to the Mac Pro onboard SATA, you're probably better off getting an external RAID enclosure and connecting that with a basic eSATA card.

Jeff Kilgroe

02-18-2008, 02:18 PM

Please let us all know (and please PM me as well) when you find out. My new Mac Pro won't get here until next week, but I'll send the RAID card (and the SAS drive) back if it doesn't support mixed modes. FWIW, the Apple Genius I talked to today said, when I asked about mixed mode support, "officially, it doesn't support mixing, and I could get in trouble for giving out unofficial information." To me that sounds like confirmation mixed-mode is supported.

My new Mac Pro still hasn't shipped... They charged the card and it says it's prepared for shipping, but no update or tracking number yet. I'm still hoping for tuesday / wednesday.

I did some looking inside a Mac Pro earlier today. Talked with another Apple tech about some things. It seems every time I talk to someone new, I get new answers and no one has tried any of this stuff... Kinda strange. However, this tech claims he has tried mixing SATA and SAS on the Apple RAID card and it does not work. According to this guy, the best solution for mixing is to run SAS drives off the RAID card and then purchase a second ipass wiring harness from Apple parts to connect to the SATA header on the logic board and rout connectors from it to the desired drive bays. When installing the RAID card, you disconnect the ipass cable from the logic board and connect to the header on the RAID card. It looks to me like it would be fairly simple to adapt a SATA cable to connect to the proper pins of the ipass SATA header on the logic board to avoid buying and installing another ipass cable harness. I don't know what Apple parts would charge for the ipass cable.

The other thing I'm now getting conflicting information on is installing additional operating systems on the Mac Pro with RAID card installed. Perhaps I took it for granted that bootcamp would work with the RAID card installed, Apple makes no statement one way or another about this and nothing on the RAID card information indicates bootcamp will not work. Online forums are cluttered with idiots trying to use bootcamp assistant to partition a 4-drive RAID-5 array for instlaling Windows. I've run across a couple posts that say it works fine as long as you're partitioning single drives and not a RAID set and you have to do the setup through disk utility... Apple has not released Windows support drivers for the RAID card yet, who knows if/when they will.

I'll try it and see.. If I can't put Vista64 and XP32 on this system that's fine, but I kinda wanted to as an interim solution until I build a new PC workstation in a few more months. My intended configuration for this Mac Pro is one HDD as the boot / application drive, and then 3 1TB SATA drives in a RAID-0 for workspace. ...I considered a 3 drive RAID-5, but I'd rather have the extra performance and capacity and I'll have regular backups to LTO and elsewhere. For the primary boot drive, I'm drooling over the soon to be released 450GB 15Krpm Seagate 15K.6 SAS drive... I'm going to borrow a 15Krpm Fujitsu 300GB SAS drive to see if I can run mixed SAS / SATA.

As for the other SAS card options, I guess I need to double check my HighPoint part numbers. None appear to be bootable though. I was hoping the Acrea cards would be bootable... They have driver support right on the Leopard CD, alas not bootable.

Chase Gordon

02-18-2008, 02:53 PM

It seems every time I talk to someone new, I get new answers and no one has tried any of this stuff... Kinda strange. However, this tech claims he has tried mixing SATA and SAS on the Apple RAID card and it does not work.

Everyone agrees that you can't combine a SAS drive with a SATA drive in any kind of array. I found a thread on another site where a guy bought the RAID card when it was only advertised as supporting SATA, plugged a SAS drive into it just to see if it would work, and said it did. It was unclear from the post if he unplugged all his SATA drives for the test, so I still can't call it confirmation. I thought I found a thread on Apple's support forums where someone said they had successfully mixed them, but I can't find it now. Grrr....

Anyway, I think the tech is probably wrong about putting a SAS drive in as a plain JBOD disk and building an array with SATA drives, but was instead trying to extend a RAID over the two different technologies.

The other thing I'm now getting conflicting information on is installing additional operating systems on the Mac Pro with RAID card installed.

I wasn't thinking about using Bootcamp so I wasn't checking carefully, but I believe I found documentation to the effect that you cannot boot Windows using Bootcamp off of any of drives attached to the RAID card because the card doesn't support some needed Windows BIOS function. Solution is to boot of an external drive if you want to use Bootcamp. I believe once it is booted, Bootcamp can see the RAID drives, but I'm not even sure of that.

As for the other SAS card options, I guess I need to double check my HighPoint part numbers. None appear to be bootable though. I was hoping the Acrea cards would be bootable... They have driver support right on the Leopard CD, alas not bootable.

I've looked about as hard as I'm willing to and have not found a single card that supports booting Mac OS off a SAS drive other than the Mac Pro RAID. I've found bootable SATA cards, and Leopard supported but non-bootable SAS cards, but not a bootable SAS card. If anyone finds one, please speak up!

=Chase=

Chase Gordon

02-19-2008, 12:09 AM

Here's some interesting news from the Apple Forums (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5906443):

You can buy an iPass cable here:

http://www.newark.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?SKU=13M3656

Apple Forums (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6157072#6794036) or later posts for more details.]

And you can use that iPass cable to use the 4 main SATA ports on the motherboard after you take the pre-installed iPass cable off the mobo and plug it into the RAID card. Apparently those are not disabled by the RAID card; they are still available and are better supported than the ODD SATA ports.

The bad news is that there's more confirmation that you can't boot into Bootcamp off anything connected to the RAID card. However, VMWare Fusion still works and it's pretty speedy.

Jeff Kilgroe

02-19-2008, 09:06 AM

Thanks for the link to the ipass cable. I may go that route... Which also makes a strong argument for loading one or two 7200rpm drives in the second optical bay if I can make the cable reach. Then I can leave all 4 3.5" bays dedicated to the RAID card...

If bootcamp doesn't work off the RAID card, that's fine... Not a big deal, I'll probably rig up something else temporarily. VMware and Parallels are nice, but don't work for my current situation. I need access to all 8 CPUs for some software I'm working on, so it has to boot into Windows directly. (those virtual solutions currently only give access to two CPUs). Booting windows on the Mac is only temporary anyway. I'm just holding out on the new PC workstation until I get get Skull Trail and a few other parts I'm waiting on.

Chase Gordon

02-19-2008, 12:40 PM

Please let us (or at least me) know when you get Bootcamp set up and how you did it. Although I don't need 8 cores on Windows, I do a few things that would benefit, so if I can dump my current Windows box in favor of Bootcamp for those few things, I will.

I ordered 2 of those iPass cables (shipping costs more than the cables and I figured someone else in Los Angeles would want one), so if the RAID card works out I'll probably use the main onboard SATA (not the ODD) either for an internal drive that I can use Bootcamp with or just route them all externally as eSATA connections, which should still work with Bootcamp.

I'm thinking I'd leave the empty optical bay for when I buy a Blu-Ray burner, but I suppose on that day I could just swap out the the SuperDrive or I could get the Blu-Ray in an external case. If I go that route, can you recommend a source for the brackets (and power cable/adapter?) that would let me mount a hard drive in the optical bay?

=Chase=

Chase Gordon

02-23-2008, 01:46 PM

So far the SAS boot drive plus 3 drive SATA RAID 5 seems to be working OK. Don't know for sure as the RAID card's battery is still charging (write cache disabled until then) and the RAID volume hasn't finished initializing, so write performance is abysmal: < 20MB/sec.

Definitely no complaints from the card or OS about mixing and matching this way.

On the other hand... The SAS (146GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.5) drive is loud. Actually, not so loud as just annoying. It hums at 250hz, unlike a 7200 RPM drive which hums at 120HZ. It's just more noticeable, plus it seems it's hit a resonance with the case.

Jeff Kilgroe

02-23-2008, 08:58 PM

At least it's working... The battery on my RAID card came fully charged, but it was installed in the system as a CTO option. I'm guessing you ordered yours separately.

I've got my system all set up and it's purring nicely. I'm starting to have second thoughts about even installing that SAS drive as the boot drive. In setting this system up, I copied nearly 600GB of stuff onto the 1TB boot drive and then later copied it over to the 3-drive RAID-0. I could sustain over 70MB/s writing to the boot drive and reads were close to 90MB/s copying it off the boot drive to the RAID. Iometer is benching my RAID (3 x 1TB) at 218MB/s read 186MB/s write. I haven't come up with a good real-world way to test that just yet, maybe in a few days. The system is nearly silent... Even with massive read / writes going on. I hear the drives, but they're quiet. It's a nice change from the G5 Quad I had sitting here until this morning... I thought that thing was quiet. Now I dread putting a CD/DVD into the Mac Pro because the optical drive is like a jet engine compared to the rest of the system. :)

I ordered two of those ipass cables. I'm going to use one to set up some eSATA ports on the system, that way I can reserve the ODD SATA ports for the optical bays. I'm really thinking of using one more of these 1TB Hitachi drives and mounting it in the second optical bay as my boot drive off the primary SATA header via ipass. Then I can use all 4 x 1TB on the RAID card in the same RAID set and see what it can really do.

Chase Gordon

02-24-2008, 09:35 PM

Man, this RAID card is PAINFUL when the battery isn't charged. You better be prepared for the day 3 months from now when it reconditions the battery. It reads OK, but the writes were down to such a crawl I couldn't do anything useful with it. Took almost 35 hours to charge!

But the good news is it definitely works. I have 1 SAS drive for boot and 3 SATA drives in RAID-5 for storage. AJA SystemTest clocks the RAID at around 140MB/s for writing. Xbench, however, proves my point, showing the SAS drive blows doors off the RAID for random access.

=Chase=

Jeff Kilgroe

02-24-2008, 10:07 PM

Yeah, I'm seeing some reports online about the battery reconditioning... Yikes. Recharge times are all over the place, some people reporting just a few hours, some reporting days. WTF? I guess I'll see what happens...

My SAS drive should be here tuesday according to FedEx. I'll put it in and see how well it performs.

Chase Gordon

02-26-2008, 01:57 AM

My SAS drive should be here tuesday according to FedEx. I'll put it in and see how well it performs.

I'm sure you'll notice the improvement. Let me know what you think of the noise.

I've borrowed a Cheetah 15K.5 for now, waiting until the 15K.6 come out (due by end of March). The .6 are spec'd as faster than my RAID array! 164 MB/s

For me, though, this is mostly tweaking just for fun. Until REDCINE works, I won't be generating anything where my current disks are the limiting factor.

Jeff Kilgroe

02-26-2008, 07:21 AM

...On fedex vehicle for delivery. I'll throw it in tonight and see what it does.

Those 15K.6 units look very nice. Good to see capacities going up too, even if 460GB is still the largest one.

Hopefully REDCINE really improves with the next release, its current state is pretty sad. IMO, it shouldn't even be considered "beta" software. More like "alpha" or proof of concept. When REDCINE does behave itself, I've found DPX output at full quality from 4K to 2K and some better filter settings will run at about 14 to 18 fps on this system since the RAID isn't a bottleneck. So once we get a good way to confirm via REDTRIP or even direct R3D integration in FCP, I'm not worried about render times to conform to 2K. 4K takes nearly 4X as long, but it is 4X the amount of data... Either way, the render farm looks like the answer -- too bad most of my render nodes are too outdated to run the software. Mostly AMD MP systems, but maybe REDLINE will work once released.

Chase Gordon

03-11-2008, 08:28 PM

FYI, I got the motherboard SATA ports connected to an eSATA bracket in the dummy PCI slot. (There are two PCI slot ports to support a double-height video card in the single PCI slot 1. Since I only have a single height card, the nVidia GeForce 8800 GT, I have a free external PCI port that is not associated with a free PCI slot, and this is where I put the bracket, so I still have full access to the empty PCI slots.)

Turns out the cable from Newark works, but is not the best deal. It would be better (and probably cheaper and faster) to get a standard SFF-8087 (controller) to 4x SATA (backplane) cable 0.5 meters long, as this would be long enough to reach the external port bracket and not need to be shipped from the UK.

[Follow up. This cabling worked OK for one drive, but not for 2 or more, due to cable length exceeding the 1 meter limit for SATA. I did have to replace the Newark cable with the half meter cable, specifically the Adaptec ACK-I-mSASx4-4SATAx1 0.5m R and had to be careful to use hard-to-find half meter eSATA cables rather than the more common one meter cables in order to get this to work with more than one drive at a time. Also, the half meter internal cable is much cleaner and just the right length: no extra slack bouncing around.]

This mostly seems to work. I had a weird issue with Bootcamp in that I couldn't install it on the eSATA drive unless I booted from the eSATA drive. Also the Mac really doesn't like it when a SATA drive disappears. I'd be very worried about swapping drives without rebooting the Mac. But I have successfully run Windows XP SP2 from the eSATA drive and though it doesn't see the RAID cards, it does work and see all 8 cores.

I'm also having another issue that once I boot into XP it only sees 2GB of memory. And there are some odd delays now and then. I doubt either of these have to do with the RAID card but you never know. [I now suspect the delays were also eSATA cabling issues.]

On the other hand, VMWare Fusion works well and has minimal overhead in the tests I've run (less than 5% performance penalty) except for graphics performance. It's also limited to 2 cores. But unlike Bootcamp, I can still use my RAID array. The only reasons I see to use Bootcamp instead of Fusion: You need access to the graphics card, e.g. for gaming or GPU acceleration of video processing, you need hardware access to the hardware ports, e.g. to reprogram the firmware in a FireWire device, or you have software that can take advantage of more than 2 cores and you want to do that.

The VMWare clone of my ancient Win2K (Athlon 1500) machine that I have kicking around for those times when I simply MUST use windows is 3-6 times as fast as the real hardware machine in everything but graphics and at least as fast in graphics. If I can get something to give me serial COM1 and COM2 ports then I can kiss that old machine goodbye.

Jeff Kilgroe

03-11-2008, 11:02 PM

I haven't posted an update to this thread for a while, but here goes...

I agree on the ipass cable from Newark. I ended up not installing it since I already threw that CalDigit 4-port eSATA PCI-e card in the system. A friend of mine has a Mac Pro as well and connected is motherboard ODD SATA headers to an external bracket. It has been non-stop headaches for him as the ports are not properly supported under XP / Vista and are not given full functionality as eSATA ports. They're just SATA ports that have been piped out of the box. ...Both OSX and Windows complain when drives disappear and it's probably best to re-boot if swapping drives or whatnot with this approach.

I returned my SAS drive to the vendor, no re-stock fee after I chatted with them a bit.

Now for the meat... I can boot Vista via bootcamp from the RAID card. :) Unfortunately, still no drivers for the RAID card under windows, so the performance just plain sucks, no way to access or see any volumes on the RAID. It's just the boot segment of the EFI system providing enough info to boot from the given partition. It was a pain to install and get running and I'm going to wipe it off anyway since it performs poorly running from the RAID controller and likes to hang. I installed Vista64 Ultimate on an eSATA drive and then made an image of that drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. Cloned that image to the bootcamp partition and then it essentially forces the boot from the bootcamp OS chooser menu. Half the time it hangs during boot-up.

I have been meaning to give vmware fusion a try. I'm familiar with Parallels and it's worked pretty good so far on my macbook pro. It does have some options for GPU acceleration that fusion does not. But it tends to only work with specific software (mostly just games). Parallels is also limited to using two CPU cores and I've found the way it handles USB devices, as well as the mounting of removable media, to be a little screwy sometimes.

Your XP installation only showing 2GB RAM is probably due to not having proper chipset drivers installed. Could be other things, but that's the most likely cause. You may need to have XP start with the "/3GB switch" to force the OS to restrain itself within the first 1GB and leave the remaining 3GB of 32bit address space for applications. However, you will only see about 3.2~3.5 GB of total RAM under a 32bit OS on this system.

tugboat

08-29-2008, 03:46 AM

Hey all, just reading through this post and have a few questions.

I currently own a quad 2.66 with 5 discs, 3x10k raptors in raid 0 (internal) a boot camp drive (ancient 8MB sata 120Gb) a small 120GB time machine disc and a 250GB Usb External.

A good friend has a 146/7 GB SAS 15k Fijitsu and I would love to use this as a Photoshop scratch disc. I noticed talk of an inexpensive Highpoint controller that could allow me to have an external SAS (I think a 2322).

So I guess my question is if this config would be possible:

3 x 10k 74GB raptors (internal SATA)
1 x 146 15k SAS (External)
2 x external E-Sata with 2 x 500GB drives (Vantec E-Sata Cases on the Aux SATA ports in the Mac Pro) One to boot windows / One storage

And this can be done with the very economical 2322 by Highpoint, or I'm losing my mind? (quite possible!)

Thanks in advance!

Chase Gordon

08-29-2008, 01:53 PM

So I guess my question is if this config would be possible:

3 x 10k 74GB raptors (internal SATA)
1 x 146 15k SAS (External)
2 x external E-Sata with 2 x 500GB drives (Vantec E-Sata Cases on the Aux SATA ports in the Mac Pro) One to boot windows / One storage

And this can be done with the very economical 2322 by Highpoint, or I'm losing my mind? (quite possible!)

I don't know about the Highpoint controller. As far as I know, you cannot boot a Boot Camp drive off the aux SATA ports. According to your configuration you should still have one primary SATA bay available; you should put the Boot Camp drive there.

tugboat

09-09-2008, 11:34 AM

Hello again, just got my 8 core 2.8, decided to do a different setup with some of the new velo raptors. I'm a little unclear about the performance and reliability of these odd sata ports still though. Is it a bad idea to use the pair for an external esata 500GB and a 250GB time machine drive? Thanks guys.

Chase Gordon

10-17-2008, 08:22 PM

Following up in case anyone else comes across this thread.

One thing I didn't realize is that the on board SATA ports are limited to a cable length of 1 meter while eSATA in general is limited to 2 meters. It is VERY hard to find an eSATA cable under 1 meter, meaning any of these eSATA setups are out of spec. While I was successful in using 2 feet of cabling inside my Mac and a 1 meter eSATA cable outside when using one drive, by the time I connected 2 drives there was no hope: the Mac hung (and painfully so) quickly or else it didn't even bother to recognize 1 of the 2 drives.

My new plan is to get the half meter internal cable and the only half meter eSATA cable I could find, the Tripp Lite P950-18I.

Note that I'm even more of a VMware convert now that VMware Fusion 2.0 is out. I just love it. I'm only doing the eSATA thing so I can do high-speed external disk-to-disk copies.

Also, I found that Keyspan makes a USB to Serial adapter that I can use to provide a COM serial port (though I use it as COM 3, not sure if I can get it to be COM 1): Keyspan USA-19HS (USA = USB Serial Adapter, HS=High Speed). Works with my clunky old Win2K software under VMware, so I'm happy.

I also got the Paragon NTFS for Mac kernel extension that lets me WRITE to NTFS drives as well as read from them. The only trick there is that when formatting NTFS drives from MacOS, you have to select a Master Boot Record style partition, which is not the default for Mac. So I've got my Mac writing to external NTFS drives that I then take to post houses that are running Scratch or Avid on Windows machines and the biggest problem is the crappy FireWire support on Windows. :)

Nook Kim

10-21-2008, 06:52 AM

How about something like this? Would this work well?

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/MPQXES2/

Chase Gordon

10-21-2008, 10:53 AM

How about something like this? Would this work well?

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/MPQXES2/

You can read about it in much greater detail in several places on the net. It has the following problems:

1) Due to cable length, it can only fit in the top slot. This means that if you have an Apple Raid card (which, due to cable length, can only fit in the top slot), then you can't use it.
2) It connects to on board SATA ports that are meant for optical disk drives (low performance) and are not seen by Windows under Boot Camp. So they are not as good as using the main SATA ports. In particular, you cannot boot a Boot Camp partition off them or use drives connected to them under Boot Camp.
3) As I mentioned in my previous post, they're still really only SATA ports, not eSATA ports, and as a result you are at risk of having trouble due to cable lengths.

For the most part, I'd advise getting a real eSATA card instead.