Synology has always been a brand that Mac users and creative individual have warmed towards, whether it is because they’re software vibes so well with the Mac operating system, or because the brand’s own structure emulates apple well, Synology NAS is a popular choice of photo editing environments in 2018. With hardware RAID the dedicated CPU and cache will free up the extra resources that are required with software RAID. End result better performance. Hi, The argument submitted above for hardware RAID turns out to usually be more of a sales argument for justifying the higher price of hardware RAID than a reality in real world Mac Pro usage.
Originally Posted by iMacfan Hi everyone, I've heard that the Mac Pro doesn't have hardware RAID. If I were to use software RAID, would that mean that the array of disks was only visible by OSX? While I don't have an answer for you. Barefeets had reported something very interesting about the RAID support WRT the Pro Macs. Aside from the 'speed issues' they found when using 4 750 GB drives that everyone seems to be focusing on another thing they stated was that the Mac Pro could BOOT directly from a RAID they created. Unless I'm mistaken this is a 'first' isn't it?
Most/all Macs in the past couldn't do that with a normal (not 3rd party cards) RAID setup. So, is this an indication that the RAID in the Pro's is in fact a 'Hardware RAID' or just that they somehow wrote the Pro Mac firmware to recognize and boot from the 'Software RAID'.
Edit: Linky: (see mid/bottom page Q&A area 'Can I boot from an internal RAID 0 set on the Mac Pro?' ) Edit2: gwoodpecker (below) confirmed that G5's can/do boot from internal (built in) RAID-0 and RAID-1 so this is NOT something 'new' for the Mac Pro. First of all, every PowerMac G5 with two SATA harddrives of identical size could be configured as a software RAID (0 or 1) before installing OS X by using Disk Utility on the system DVD. You were able to boot OS X from both RAID 1 or 0 (which is what I still do). Secondly, creating a RAID in normal OS X allows only RAID 0 and 1. So with the Mac Pro, you could have one startup disk, a two-disk RAID and still have one drive bay free.
Or you create a three- or four-drive RAID-0 (where data integrity is pretty much = 0 when one drive fails.). With OS X Server, if I recall things correctly, you can also create RAID-5 volumes. With four drives in the MacPro, a RAID-5 would generate 3x the size of one of the disks (e.g. 1.5 TB when using four 500 GB disks), with good data integrity (due to the parity information being spread across all drives) and quite good write and read speed.
Concerning the formatting: volumes formatted with HFS+ are only visible in OS X and not in Windows (unless you're using some super-duper special software for Windows). If you create a FAT32 formatted disk, both OS X and Windows can see (read AND write) to it. When using NTFS as formatting option in Windows, OS X can only see (read) the files but you can't write to that disk. And it's even more complicated: FAT32 volumes can only be 32 GB in size when formatting them in Windows, so a RAID configuration is pretty much out of question anyway because of the small size.
When using Disk Utility, I found out a few months ago that you can format external harddrives with FAT32 regardless of its size - I used a 2.5' 60 GB LaCie mobile drive -, Windows XP can use it just like that). Hardware RAID means: a special controller chipset takes care of striping or mirroring the data onto several harddrives, whereas with software RAID, the regular CPU(s) take care of it. With RAID-5, a lot of parity information must be written, therefore making software RAIDs a lot slower than using a dedicated hardware RAID-5 card. Originally Posted by ZachPruckowski Is software RAID-0 as fast as hardware (or nearly?) Will I see a performance benefit from 2 RAID-0'd 160GB HDDs versus a 250 GB HDD, assuming all are 8-16MB cache and 7200rpm? Because I read somewhere that the harddrive could be a potential Mac Pro bottleneck (along with RAM latency) In my G5 DualCore 2.0 GHz, I have a RAID-0 with two (not even identical) 7200rpm SATA drives (8 MB of cache each). Read and write speed for the RAID-0 is about 100 Megabytes per second (measured with Helios LAN Test 3.1 on the local harddrive - which gives quite accurate results when using 300 MB test files, saturating both the two SATA buses and all drive caches).
![Lan Raid For Mac Editing Lan Raid For Mac Editing](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125596915/582626712.png)
One single, not RAID-ed drive goes up to about 60 MB/sec, depending on the drive. Modern SATA-II buses have a theoretical bandwidth of 3.0 Gbit/s (around 300 MB/sec effective speed) and most 7200rpm harddrives today use up only about one fifth of that bandwidth. So harddrives can indeed be some kind of bottleneck. Using 10K or 15K drives is better and faster, but they run louder and a lot hotter. You might get over 80 MB/sec per drive using those. Hardware RAID is always faster because of the deditated processing units.
Maybe in RAID-0 configurations, the speed difference is not so big, but when using RAID-5 where a lot of parity information needs to be computed, the difference is huge! Servers almost always use hardware RAIDs for that reason.
One single 250 GB drive, however, is for sure a lot slower than the two-drive 160 GB RAID-0. Sorry to resurrect this thread again but it's the closest I've found to my particular issue; I have a new Mac Pro (early 2008) and had it delivered with Mac OSX (Leopard) on the drive in Bay 1 and a second drive in Bay 2 upon which I've since installed Windows XP x64 (SP 2c). So far, so good and every thing seems to be working. What I am now trying to do is to install my two WD Raptors from my old PC into the Mac Pro for storing my data on. I'd like to set them up as a RAID 1 (mirrored) so that they are automatically backed up. They are not going to be used as boot disks, purely for data storage that I can read & write to from both OSes. If I create a RAID 1 in OSX with Disk Utility, it cannot be seen in Windows XP x64 (drives are noted as 'unspecified?'
Partition with an 128MB EFI partiton at the front of the drives). In Windows XP Disk Management I can't convert the disks to dynamic and so can't set up the mirror there either. If I create two separate FAT32 drives in OSX they work fine in both OSes but that rather defeats the object of setting up the RAID mirror. Does anyone have any helpful advice on how to (or whether I can) set up a RAID 1 mirror that is readable from both OSes? (I did find a product called CrossStripe -but this won't work with Windows XP x64!) TIA.
SoftRAID 2019 Mac apple stopped actively working on AppleRAID in 2009 and removed full support for it in El Capitan. If you ever had a problem with your AppleRAID volumes, you were stuck. Now, however, you can use those same volumes with SoftRAID mac crack no need to copy all the files from one volume to another. You can just convert your AppleRAID stripe and mirror volumes and to SoftRAID volumes. Your volumes will be just as fast or faster and you can take full advantage of SoftRAID’s renowned speed, reliability and support. SoftRAID Mac Features:.
SoftRAID now in 4 Languages. SoftRAID supports RAID 4, RAID 5 and RAID 1+0 volumes. You can convert your AppleRAID stripe volume to a RAID 1+0 volume. SoftRAID can also create RAID 4 and RAID 5 volumes. You can test a disk before you start using it, monitor it for defects. You can even have the SoftRAID Monitor notify you via email whenever there is a problem.
The SoftRAID Monitor is always watching your disks and volumes. You can create volumes with several different RAID levels. Any SoftRAID volume can use up to 16 disks.
The disks can even be in different enclosures to give you more flexibility and higher performance. You can’t get this level of flexibility and performance from hardware RAID. SoftRAID RAID 1+0 volumes have a great combination of speed, simplicity. RAID volumes are faster than RAID 1+0 volumes.
SoftRAID RAID volumes are ideal for reading and writing large files. They are also good for small files which are frequently read but infrequently written. If a disk fails in a stripe volume, you will lose all the files on that volume. A SoftRAID volume can protect you from disk failure, hardware failure and be part of a backup strategy to protect your business from theft, fire, flooding and other calamities. Mirror volumes provide the greatest level of protection. Thunderbolt 2 enclosure combined with state of the art RAID software.
Most RAID products just protect you from losing files when a disk fails. It can also detect when a disk is starting to become less reliable. Requirements:. Mac OS X Kodiak, 10.0 (Cheetah), 10.1 (Puma), 10.2 (Jaguar), 10.3 (Panther), 10.4 (Tiger), 10.5 (Leopard), 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion). OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion), 10.9 (Mavericks), 10.10 (Yosemite), 10.11 (El Capitan) and. macOS 10.12 (Sierra), 10.13 (High Sierra) and Later Version. Supported hardware: Intel or PowerPC Mac.