Mac Pro RAID Card - installation and first run
Correction: the card has 512MB of cache and shouldn't keep the discs spinning in case of failure, but keep the write-buffer intact until it can be written to the discs (please correct me if I am wrong).
The Mac Pro RAID Card is known as one of the most underperforming and featureless RAID cards in the market. It blocks you from running Windows via Boot Camp. It eats a lot of electricity. It is not (if at all) much faster than software RAID 0. It is long, runs hot, consumes a lot of electricity and doesn't accept drives larger than 2.2GB (2GB practical). It doesn't make sense to migrate to such setup anymore.
However, it seamlessly takes over the internal drive bays of your Mac Pro, allowing you to install fast-spinning 15K RPM SAS disks - a relevant feature before SSDs provided fast random reads and writes. It also allows you to have RAID 5 in your Mac Pro and continue working in case you are about to lose a hard drive.
I am planning to temporarily move abroad and I am leaving my server behind. My Mac Pro is most probably becoming my new workstation AND server. So I decided to experiment with this card, see if it makes sense for me and take the opportunity to document it better.
In this video, I walk through the installation and first run of the card.
Index:
00:00 - Introduction
03:00 - Explaining the setup
03:41 - Moving my boot device to another PCIe slot
05:14 - Installing the card
06:05 - Removing the PCIe ambient fan
06:26 - First boot and RAID Utility
13:35 - System info