Rocket Dual eSATA 6Gb/s For MacPro

[Steve Steele]

This is new I believe. I've only seen a couple of online reviews which get bad raitings, but I don't trust the reviews because they may be coming from one person. Don't know

Interesting card though if you want to get near 500 MB/s for your SSD RAID 0 on a MacPro with PCIe 2. Has two eSATA ports, Can use a soft raid.

Check the specs..

http://www.hptmac.com/product.php?_inde ... pe=details

PCI-Express 2.0 x1 (Backward compatible to PCI-Express 1.0)
Support SATA I, II and III
2 eSATA 6Gb/s ports
Up to 600MB/s per port

SATA 6Gb/s
PCI-Express 2.0 x1
Industry Standard AHCI compliant
Hot Plug capability
SMART
eSATA Hot Swap
System Requirements: Mac Pro 2006 to Newest ; Mac OS X 10.4.x or later

Nice way to put some speed back into your MacPro

[jweisbin]

High Point is a Chinese company. I've used many of their RAID cards, and I've compared them with cards made by Areca and others, and they look surprisingly similar, which leads me to believe they don't actually manufacture them, but have them manufactured for them and write their own custom ROM's and drivers. But I could be wrong. In any case, at one time I had standardized on their 4322 card (4 x SAS to 8 data drives, sata II not III), because it does RAID 6 at decent performance levels. I had 5 servers all running the same card, which costs about $750 each, plus the cost of the special sas to sata fan-out cables (not cheap), and of course the drive enclosures holding 8 sata drives (I got those from Granite Digital).

In three years I had all five cards fail and have to be replaced at various times. In addition, I bought industry standard drives and found some brands just didn't work with these cards, and had to be returned. Because I originally got the cards from Granite Digital, they were kind enough to RMA them pretty quickly for me, but eventually I had to deal directly with High Point. The experience was dreadful. It took two months to RMA the last one, and when I got the "new" card (in a sealed box) it was password protected, so clearly not "new".

Their local American branch seems to have no one that can understand English, and won't return phone calls. Support tickets, once logged, take weeks for an answer. So, based on these experiences, I would never buy from them again.

I have since switched to Areca (ARC 1882X, RAID 6 at sata III speeds). I was actually able to speak with someone there on the phone with a question I had, and he actually called me back. From what I can tell, the cards look almost identical, so, like I said, probably just different ROMs and drivers. But so far the Areca cards have been rock solid. But they don't seem as well known as High Point. One thing that continues to surprise me is that both companies use a small fan on the card to cool the processor. It looks cheap, is noisy, and looks like it will fail in no time at all. And these cards get hot!

The one you posted about does not have a fan, so that is hopeful.

BTW, changing from the 3 g data card to the 6 g sata card (and supplying all new 6 g Hitachi drives), I did not see a noticeable speed increase. But that may be due to the overhead of RAID 6, and the fact that I increased the drive capacities (2 TB each from 1 TB each).

Currently I would recommend an all-in-one SATA or SAS RAID enclosure for a setup requiring less than 6 or 8 drives. You don't have to worry about drivers, you don't have to setup the RAID settings, you just switch it on and your done. And thunderbolt may wind up making SAS obsolete for all but server rooms.

Just my opinion.

[kgdrum]

I was researching card options last year and had a similar experience trying to talk to the Highpoint customer service rep here in the US.
We couldn't understand each other and I couldn't get any technical info questions answered that I needed confirmation on.
So I stayed with Firmtek (used in a G5 also) and got a new card for my MacPro from them,kind of another small company but they do answer questions & respond to emails, so far the new card has been OK.

[jweisbin]

Here's one I wish I had known about:

http://www.caldigit.com/raidcard/

Another small company with interesting products. I jut bought their card which has two sata ports and two USB 3 ports, works great, driverless.

[Steve Steele]

Thanks jweisbin/kgdrum. I tried calling them and emailing them. Got a Chinese lady who tried to help but it was a difficult conversation, and she finally asked me to email her my questions so that she could read them. They did respond to my emails but I had lost interest by then. I'll check out Caldigit and Firmtek. I don't want to invest too much more in my 2008 MacPro, but I might as well get the most out of it if a product is reliable and the price doesn't outweigh the performance.

"BTW, changing from the 3 g data card to the 6 g sata card (and supplying all new 6 g Hitachi drives), I did not see a noticeable speed increase. But that may be due to the overhead of RAID 6, and the fact that I increased the drive capacities (2 TB each from 1 TB each)."

That's interesting. If I decide to buy a card I'll probably stick to a a couple of SSDs in RAID 0 and use TM, and manual backups. Primitive I know, but it's fine for my situation.

Thanks for the info.

[jweisbin]

That's interesting. If I decide to buy a card I'll probably stick to a a couple of SSDs in RAID 0 and use TM, and manual backups. Primitive I know, but it's fine for my situation.

Before you do that, see this:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storag ... id0_7.html

RAID started out as a method to A: get more storage capacity from commercially available drives, or B: get data protection by having parity (RAID 1 etc) or C: speed up read and write by striping (RAID 0). This worked mainly because mechanical drives have moving heads - while one head is moving the other could be reading or writing, etc. With SSD's there are no mechanical heads, so that advantage goes away. All the research that I have done is inconclusive as to whether SSD's benefit from RAID 0. And SSD prices right now are pretty straight line - in other words, about $1 per GB no matter what the size (but 6g is more expensive). OWC is selling 960 GB SSD's. If you add together the cost of two 480's and factor in the cost of the RAID card, cables, enclosure, etc, you might be surprised. And then there's this:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDPHW2R960/
full PCIe speed (over 6g speed) SSD on a card

[Steve Steele]

That's interesting. If I decide to buy a card I'll probably stick to a a couple of SSDs in RAID 0 and use TM, and manual backups. Primitive I know, but it's fine for my situation.

Before you do that, see this:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storag ... id0_7.html

RAID started out as a method to A: get more storage capacity from commercially available drives, or B: get data protection by having parity (RAID 1 etc) or C: speed up read and write by striping (RAID 0). This worked mainly because mechanical drives have moving heads - while one head is moving the other could be reading or writing, etc. With SSD's there are no mechanical heads, so that advantage goes away. All the research that I have done is inconclusive as to whether SSD's benefit from RAID 0. And SSD prices right now are pretty straight line - in other words, about $1 per GB no matter what the size (but 6g is more expensive). OWC is selling 960 GB SSD's. If you add together the cost of two 480's and factor in the cost of the RAID card, cables, enclosure, etc, you might be surprised. And then there's this:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDPHW2R960/
full PCIe speed (over 6g speed) SSD on a card

From the people I've talked to, or articles I've read were this was tested, SSDs in RAID0 have nearly doubled the random and sustained read and write speeds for a decent amount of time. However, over the long term, I've seen some slow, but I'm not sure what it was due to. Check these out.

http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_ss ... aid_review

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiYGJTnu ... ata_player

I understand your point though. The guy on youtube is having that problem but it's a soft RAID, and he enabled TRIM a few months after building it.

Maybe next year or so, the larger SSDs might be affordable. But I'm trying to do what I can this year, without spending much. Even if the system becomes antiquated in 12 months. It's due to the projects I'm working on now. I simply need more CPU and buss speed.

I've looked into the PCIe cards, and was close to buying one, but they're pricey. $800 for a 480GB PCIe SSD is ok depending on which MacPro one has. Luckily I have a 2008, but the 2009 is much more flexible. It is a cleaner solution than trying to get my MacPro to do "almost" 6G through PCIe eSATA. I did price that and with the card, cables and enclosure, I could do that for about $300. (I already have the SSDs). That's a $500 difference, and maybe you're right. But now the bottleneck for my work is the CPU. Dog chasing his tail. ha.

Realistically, what I'll probably due is either get a MacMini (the i7 server, and install two SSDs in RAID0), and use it as a sample slave, or wait to see what Apple does with the MacPro and Mini line in 2013. If the MacMini were to hold more RAM (has to be 32GBs or more) I would consider going modular with multiple MacMinis with internal RAIDs (or not), and TB everything else.

I do have two questions about that article. Thy say "a two-disk RAID0 may turn out to be slower than a single large-capacity SSD". I haven't seen that. Have you?

Also, "More importantly, SATA RAID controllers, including those in modern chipsets, do not support the TRIM command. As a result, the array’s writing performance degrades over time whereas single SSDs are less susceptible to this problem."

In a soft RAID (despite that guy's video), if TRIM is enabled after the RAID is made, might it still work? I don't know.

Thanks for the link. Looking forward to next year!

[jweisbin]

I do have two questions about that article. Thy say "a two-disk RAID0 may turn out to be slower than a single large-capacity SSD". I haven't seen that. Have you?

Also, "More importantly, SATA RAID controllers, including those in modern chipsets, do not support the TRIM command. As a result, the array’s writing performance degrades over time whereas single SSDs are less susceptible to this problem."

In a soft RAID (despite that guy's video), if TRIM is enabled after the RAID is made, might it still work? I don't know.

Bigger and newer SSD's have more memory channels, the more memory channels, the faster they are.

Not sure about soft RAID but I would assume that's true.

Mac mini's are 2-core i5 chips unless you buy the server model which is 4-core i7. Apple's SSD's are very pricey and not the fastest, though probably very reliable. OWC are fast but tricky to install in the mini's. I did one and I wouldn't want to do it again.

[mikehalloran]

There are cards that support eSATA Port Multiplier protocol. If that is supported, there are boxes that can add 5 eSATA ports per one on the card.

Most Addionics PCIe cards support this protocol.