After months of reading and counting money, I've decided to replace the disks in my first generation MAC PRO (3Ghz Model Identifier MacPro2,1) . I have been using the Apple Raid card with 4 1TB Samsung SATA drives and while the Apple Raid Card never really performed very well, I also never really thought much about it. It was more or less an install and forget type of thing. This time however, things would be different. The SSDs are capable of reaching transfer rates that would require a fast RAID Controller.
Now the Apple Raid Card has been bagged by more than one review out there. It is basically pretty useless and limits data transfer to 320MB/s. Barefeat has many reviews and comparisons on their website. One comprehensive test can be found here:
So what did I test? First, following some common sense, I installed the 2 SSDs in a RAID0. Then I used a single SSD just to compare the performance, followed by removing the Apple Raid Card altogether, using only the internal standard controller and a software based Raid 0. The results are crazy. The Apple Raid card is actually slower than the internal controller in a software based RAID0 configuration. Sure, it is probably all about redundancy and the Raid Card has been good in this regard. But it cost me more than $1000. That's a bit rich for something that doesn't perform at all.
You may think something went wrong and clearly a hardware based raid should outperform a software based solution, but I'm not the only one with these findings. Barefeats again run the same test on the brand new MacPro with the BRAND NEW Apple Raid card and the results are less than flattering once again. Apple just doesn't seem to be able to create a decent Raid controller.
The software based Raid0 results on Barefeat are here:
Here are my test results on XBench 1.8:
RAID0 with an Apple Raid Card. Results are consistant between 389 and 381:
Software RAID0 wihtout the Apple Raid Card. Results are between 400 and 415:
I just got a copy of QuickBench 4 and did some testing on the software raid0 configuration. ( I didn't have QuickBench before, so no data for the hardware Raid for now.)
These figures are quite good. But I want my hardware based Raid back. It is after all more reliable and in a perfect world also quicker than the software Raid. After a lot of reading and thinking, I have ordered a HighPoint RocketRaid 3510 for my SSD setup. It will arrive soon. So expect more tests and hopefully a further increase in performance, too. (I can't quite see how this would be possible but I need the controller anyway.)
The HighPoint RocketRaid 3510 has been tested by Barefeats and the results have been impressive indeed with 4 SSD drives. You can see the results here:
So, the Apple Raid card will be on eBay soon, making room for the HighPoint RocketRaid 3510.