(Most recent reports first)
"
Hi Mike,
I know itıs a bit late but I wanted to add my five cents to the IDE Raid
discussion:
My config is a Acard Ahard Raid with two 75 Gig IBM (showing as 143.16 Gig)
drives in a G4 dual 533, Radeon, 640 Mb Ram.
The machine is exclusively used as a Final Cut Pro editing workstation, the
raid drives only for video capture and, as you can see from the pic
attached, the thing just screams.
As far as reliability and stability is concerned:
This machine is under heavy duty every day since March and I havenıt had one
single problem. Absolutely no issues whatsoever, pure pleasure and joy. Itıs
the fastest and most stable Mac I have ever had.
Regards,
Peter B.
"
I asked Peter to test again with the 8MB IO size setting, since the graph below is with a 2MB IO size setting, and the 75GXP drives have a 2MB cache. (Best to set ATTO to its max setting - 8MB so that you're not seeing just the results of the disk's caches.)
"
I wrote two database reviews comparing the UltraTek (nothing but trouble
for my G4/500DP...like yours) with the Sonnet RAID.
I also sent you some mail/and you sent some back/re the SoftRAID driver
performance of the Sonnet PCI RAID hardware card...and you suggested
that I try the Apple drivers, which I did! Unreal...more than 64MB/sec
sustained write performance.
To recap, I had nothin but LOTs of trouble with the VST card, and sent
it back for a refund because it was full of issues, ie data corruption
and slower than native IDE bus performance. Why pay for a slower bus
than the stock one I asked myself? The Sonnet PCI RAID card solved all
my woes.
A further report--to now....nothing but net on this setup. The Apple
Drive Setup/Sonnet PCI RAID card has to be the fastest IDE drive
available at any price....enclosed please find my ATTO Tools graph to
check out. This drive (86GB RAID) is the snappiest, fastest hard drive
setup I've ever used, including any and all SCSI setups I own...ie an
Initio A100U2W RAID bus with Quantum 10K drives is not as fast as my
Sonnet PCI RAID/IBM GXP 45s and others.
It just does everything blazing fast....everything takes less time to
do, literally everything from working with my media programs to burning CDRs.
If you have anyone with a higher sustained write/read performance in
your database I'll be surprised as hell...
later,
David
"
"
hey mike. I've got a G4/733, with the sonnet hardware raid IDE card.
I have two 60GB 5400 RPM Western Digital drives hooked up to it (one
raid volume). Sustained read and write speeds of around 70MB/s.
The RAID volume shows up fine under OS X as well, though I haven't
tested whether you can have OS X installed on a RAID volume and boot
from it.
If you or your reader need any more info on this, as always, just shout.
Best regards,
Jeffrey
"
"
I have a 2001 G4 DP 533. I also have 3 45Gb IBM GXP HDs. So I
needed a card to run them in the new machine. I got the Sonnet
(Acard) IDE RAID card with the dip-switches. The bottom line is I
could get the machine to boot with the card installed but if ANY HD
was hooked up to the card the machine would hang while it was doing
hardware checks prior to the happy mac icon appearing. I ended up
getting Sonnet to refund my money and send me one of their non-raid
IDE cards which works fine under OS 9 and OS X (with latest firmware).
----Asa
"
"
Hi Mike
I've AEM 6806 acard running on stripe mode using two set of IBM GXP 15G
and it's no glitch. Only I could not make my system copy for restore
'cos the checksum from disk copy always stated it's not correct, but
it's fine if running on IDE mode. So I got 5 harddisks in my G4 500MP!!!
Bryan
"
I assume the 6806 is a typo (Acard's RAID card is a 6860).
"
Mike,
I'm running a Sonnet TempoRAID card in a dual G4 450 Gigabit Ethernet. I
have two Maxtor 60 gig 5400 RPM drives hooked up to it.
I'm using it as primarly as my Media Drive for FinalCut Pro 2 but it gets
used for other stuff as well (Photoshop scratch disk, etc.) I also have a
Matrox RTMac card and an Adaptec 2906 card installed in this unit.
Everything seems to work just fine (I've had it installed for for
probably 3 weeks or so). I seem to recall flashing the TempoRAID card
with whatever the latest firmware updater was from Acard before I
attached the drives and built the array.
FWIW.
Best,
Randy Wyan
Digital Graphix & Design
"
"
Hi Mike,
I have the Acard IDE RAID card (with switches) and it works fine both under 9.1 and OSX 10.0.3 on my DP 533. I have not noted issues (and it's even OC'd to 600 to throw more variables into the mix). I have updated to the latest frimware version as well.
cheers,
Louis LaRegina
"
Thanks to all that responded.
Related Articles:
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