Mac and HighPoint RR 2220

[simonbaker]

Query:

Has anyone tried to run two of these cards in the same machine? Apple Power Mac G5 PCI-X under OS X 10.4.11. I don't necessarily need a RAID set to bridge the two cards, I just want more ports for additional RAIDs. Is it possible? HighPoint says there is support for this on Windows and Linux etc., but no specific mention of Mac compatibility.

Thanks!

-Simon

 

[ddrueding]

We don't have many people here with Mac experience, unfortunately. But stick around, I may be wrong.

And welcome!

 

[Bozo]

Welcome to Storage Forum!

This would be a guess, but, OS X is a sudo linux build based on BSD if I remember correctly.

If you already have the cards plug them in and see what happens.

 

[timwhit]

Linux and BSD are completely different kernels. Just as different as say Solaris and Linux.

Mac OS X is based on an older BSD kernel, the fork happened around 13 years ago.

Here's a nice diagram of Unix history.

 

[Sol]

Actually I think it's even more different than that when it comes to drivers. OS X drivers are written in C++ and Linux, and I think BSD, drivers are mostly written in C.

I can't really answer the original question though. I can't think of any good reason why 2 cards wouldn't work if you just wanted to use them to access the disks which you then raided in software. That shouldn't require special driver support (unless the drives are really badly written) and if it works on Linux or Windows then there is unlikely to be a problem with the actual cards conflicting on the bus. Using them for raid seems to offer slightly more potential for failure. But that's all a total guess and hardly worth basing purchasing decisions on. If you already have all the hardware in question, however, I would be pretty confident that it wouldn't catch fire if you tried it out in that configuration.

 

[simonbaker]

Yeah if I had 2 cards i would have tried. I've just gotten a chime-in from HighPoint: "This card was not designed to run in the mac system" [but we wrote a mac driver and made it somehow work?] One card runs fine... bah. Thanks for the input, and keep it coming if anyone knows anything further.

Thanks!

 

[Santilli]

I was a mac fanatic, just prior to X. When X came in, it pretty much made all my hardware worthless, no drivers.
I tried to run multiple cards, in both PC's and Macs, with little success.

My general experience with Macs was that the chipsets were designed for what Apple thought was going to be the Max throughput avaliable at the time. Grackle maxed at 73 mb/sec, Dell did the same thing with IDE channels, making a channel that supported only one drive, not two.

I found that in general, the mac motherboards would run ONE card, not two, and, I tried
two many times.

I also had Adaptec and Promise tell me that two cards would work on a Mac motherboard, and, they finally admitted the would not, after I tried it. Never refunded my money, either.

My last macs were G3's, and, IIRC, the guys I hung out with did get some great numbers using Adaptec cards and multiple SCSI drives, but, they maxed out around 180 MB/sec, with later
model computers. Also, if you are booting off the raid is another question all together.


I have found that to run multiple raid cards you need to move up to server quality
hardware, like Supermicro, etc. and, even then some cards work with some cards, and others don't.

My guess would be
www.granitedigital.com
would have some experience with what you are trying to do.