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Seth Weintraub's picture
Seth Weintraub

Apple versus Google

More posts | Read bio

November 17, 2007 - 7:49 A.M.

Apple Mac Pro RAID Card is an SAS controller

14 comments

Apple, probably because they don't offer SAS hard drives as standard or add-on for their MacPro machines, neglected to mention that the SATA RAID card they are selling for their MacPros is also a SAS RAID card.

SAS configurations offer much more speed and different network configuration options than SATA.

Thanks to Flickr user Trancepriest who points out that Apple's uber-expensive $999 SATA RAID (Revision 1306) card is also a reasonably-priced SAS card. It turns out that if you plug in a few 10,000 or 15,000 RPM SAS hard drives into the motherboard, you'll be grooving along with some pretty seriously fast hard drive access. Our new friend, Mr. Trancpriest is rocken 1.78Tb of it.

SAS Apple RAID Drive

Nowhere in the description on Apple's web page (pasted below) does it mention this functionality. Likely, Apple isn't going to let this power go to waste. Expect to see product announcements in the near future that take advantage of this functionality. See ten more things we'd love to see in the next MacPro.

For those of you who need a refresher on Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) versus SATA RAID, hit up Wikipedia.

Apple's SATA RAID card description:

The Mac Pro RAID Card offers improved storage performance and data protection to your Mac Pro system — up to 304MB/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 256MB 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.

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 Level Drive Requirements Benefit
Enhanced JBOD One to four drives A non-RAID configuration with the ability to migrate to a RAID set at any time
RAID 0 (striping) Two to four hard drives Maximum performance and capacity for the most demanding I/O requirements
RAID 1 (mirroring) Two hard drives Maximum protection for critical data
RAID 5 Three or four hard drives Data protection, up to 199MB/s of sequential read performance, and efficient capacity utilization
RAID 0+1 Four hard drives A 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.

Please note: The Mac Pro RAID Card occupies the top PCI Express expansion slot (slot 4).

What People Are Saying

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Areca, not.

Submitted by Jeeve on December 20, 2008 - 8:37 P.M.

I just purchased the Areca ARC 1680 SAS controller card, and it's not working on my Mac Pro.

The system sees the card, the web based controller sofware sees the drives and volumes, but the volumes don't mount on my Mac.

I've already spent 2 days on it and I've lost tons of money...
Not good.

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Ugh

Submitted by Anonymous on January 7, 2008 - 10:38 P.M.

It apparently doesn't matter unless you also blow big money on Apple's overpriced hard drives:

From Apple Mac Pro/Xserve RAID Card FAQ:

Question: What drives does Apple support with the Mac Pro RAID Card and the Xserve RAID Card?

Answer: Only Apple drives are supported with the Mac Pro RAID Card and the Xserve RAID Card.

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Difference between Apple supported and raid card supported

Submitted by Anonymous on June 6, 2009 - 12:07 A.M.

This statement is completely true; APPLE does NOT support any non-apple hardware. That being said, that doesn't mean it won't work. In this case, it most certainly doesn't mean that.
If you want to be able to call Apple's support and complain that the drive's broken, it has to be an Apple drive ;-)

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Untrue. Mine's flyin' along

Submitted by Anonymous on March 22, 2009 - 4:15 P.M.

Untrue. Mine's flyin' along nicely with 4 Seagates in there.

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That does not make any

Submitted by Anonymous on August 18, 2008 - 11:59 A.M.

That does not make any sense. Any SAS or SATA capable drive should work fine. Well, it does not matter now anyway, because High Point Communications (one of my favorite raid companys) has come out with a bootable Raid controller for under 500 dollars. Bite it Apple!

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Is Mac Pro Raid card a real SAS?

Submitted by Francesco Mazzotta on December 2, 2007 - 5:37 A.M.

hello, I have seen two picture of SAS hd on internet: one FujitsuSAS hd with SATA compatible connector. The other one is a seagate with a very large connector incompatible with sata standard.
What is the real SAS hd?

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The difference between the

Submitted by Anonymous on December 19, 2007 - 12:16 P.M.

The difference between the 'true' SAS connector (dual-port) and the SATA style (single port) is simply one of keying.

You can hack a SATA signal and power connector to attach to the dual-SAS style socket with a pair of sharp clippers, this is less than ideal however. There are also SAS-to-SATA adapter sockets which takes the 14-pin SAS plug (keyed to prevent SATA cables) and converts it to 2 separate SATA type 7-pin connectors.

Keep in mind, a SATA only HBA card _cannot_ drive a SAS disk. There are many SAS HBA cards which have SATA type internal ports under the assumption that users will be buying SATA disks anyway. This appears to be what Apple has done.

Hope this helps.

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Is this a home grown RAID

Submitted by Anonymous on November 19, 2007 - 7:16 P.M.

Is this a home grown RAID stack or is it OEM from somewhere? What makes the SAS/SATA IC on this controller?

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worth it!

Submitted by merlia on November 18, 2007 - 11:22 P.M.

The Apple product is extremely fast and highly usable product among every1 than pc, though its expensive but worth for it, which increases performance, create a massive volume for video editing, clear picture view than pc, fast data storage likewise has its own functions to use.

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Apple RAID Card still EXPENSIVE

Submitted by Anonymous on November 18, 2007 - 5:29 P.M.

The fact that the Apple RAID card supports SAS is expected. Areca sells 8 port SAS controllers for the Mac Pro for $700. As such, a the Apple 4 channel card is almost 50% more with half the channels.

SAS hard drives are expensive. 300GB hard drives typically cost as much as $800 while 1TB SATA drives are $300. It is hard to justify the cost of SAS for most end users. In addition, while the SAS controllers also support SATA hard drives I have found that they are about 10% slower with RAID 5 than a typical SATA host adapter.

At this point in time SAS offers limited advantages when you consider cost/performance.

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