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Author Topic: Would a true hardware raid card work with cham & is there such a thing f. macOS?  (Read 2615 times)

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terramir

  • Observer
  • Posts: 20
That is a question I've been breaking my head over for a while, my newly made hack which is about to be a 4 core would so fly with a true Hardware raid setup, the last one I had was a tx2 card but that was for widowz. (I still have that card but it's ide and those drives are so slow) Heck a single sata drive can outperform the last true ide raid setup I had. Chipset raid is fake raid never mind that. I'm talking honest to goodness true one drive seen by the os impossible to be rejected hardware raid. True hardware raid cards are rare though many even dedicated cards are fake raid.
But if I can find a true hardware raid card that works with macOS does cham have something going on that would stand in the way?
Just a question
terramir

Kabyl

  • VoodooLabs
  • Posts: 158
Chameleon sees what the BIOS sees since it uses BIOS calls to read the disks.

I suppose disks setup in a true HW RAID card would show as one single disk to the OS and to the BIOS, so installing Chameleon on it would be the same thing as on a regular disk.

If you can wait a few days, I'll try to get someone to try it.

Terc

  • Forum Moderator
  • Posts: 129
I've tried it, it does work.  Just make sure you get a compatible card.  The Apple software raid is honestly pretty good though, and being free... well, that's not bad either.  http://www.hptmac.com/US/index.htm  I have a RocketRAID 2302 that worked just fine.  In fact, the drivers are included with Snow Leopard.

When comparing a good controller with software raid vs a raid controller, I saw no significant difference in performance.  These highpoint cards are much better than the crappy Intel ICH series, and more stable, and faster than the jmicron crap.  Having the ability to monitor your RAID from within OSX is a very useful capability.  I would highly recommend considering OS X software raid with a good controller instead of a true hardware raid card.  Now, if you're planning a 6+ disk array, maybe hardware raid would be worth offloading, but if you have a quad core system running at 2.6+Ghz/core, do you really think your system is going to struggle to handle I/O? It won't.

I hear good things about the LSI1068e also, but I don't have one to try out.
« Last Edit: August 25, 2010, 05:11:54 PM by Terc »

meklort

  • VoodooLabs
  • Posts: 65
As stated before, most RocketRaid (all of the 42xx) cards are compatible as well as Areca cards. Make sure to check the manufacturers webpage for compatibility.
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terramir

  • Observer
  • Posts: 20
today i'm gonna try software raid for the first time on this system, Hardware raid is going to have to wait until such time when I upgrade to the motherboard because the only ones I've seen so far have a 4c pci-e slot and this board only has 1x and the 16x (graphiccard) slot. PCI-e 1x in the pci-e 2.0 specs does support 500 mb/s which would be more than enough for a raid 5 and well I would like only 2 raid array's one raid 0 with two ssd's for the system and one raid 5 array with 3 drives for my video data and frequent back-up's. But that's all in good time. Imagine a full boot in less than 5 seconds (after it starts loading) Catch is the processor would probably have a hard time catching up. And data security on my store array (video and other stuff) would be nice.
But one thing at a time. ;)
Anyways this question is something I'd been asking myself for a while.
Thanks
terramir


 

Terc

  • Forum Moderator
  • Posts: 129
RAID 5 = YUCK.  Use that crap for data archival only... and really, you should be using ZFS instead at that point.  Go google "RAID 5 Write hole"  If performance is your goal, avoid RAID 5 like the plague.

Sorry, I'm a bit of a data storage and archival junkie.  I could talk about this stuff for days.