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Gigabyte Z77X-UP5TH Motherboard raid Function.....

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Hi there!

I'm wondering if anyone has tried to enable the hardware raid on either the intel Z77 or Marvell controller to built a Raid 0 (or 5) volume and make it bootable to mountain lion? is it possible? or are we stuck to the apple software raid?

would it support trim in raid 0 for ssd? or will my intel 520 will soon be more sluggish than a 5400 rpm drive?

other than that :
if I buy an Areca 1882ix with the 4 sas internal port (16 sata 6g ports) and built a Raid 0 array of 8ssd and a raid 6 of 8x4Tb,
would I be able to boot on the ARECA raid 0 SSD ? or shall i better just buy a OWC PCIe SSD and just a 8 port areca HBA for the raid 6 ?
 
The motherboard's "hardware" RAID is not. Just as PC manufacturers have been selling for years (Promise being an old "favourite") it's just some bootstrap and maybe some tiny bit of hardware, leaving the real RAID work up to drivers inside Windows.
About as useful as "mammary glands on a bull"...

You can easily set up software RAID-0 in OS X, but there are some supported RAID cards (that Areca seems to be among them). No idea if you can boot off it (hopefully yes) but I've gotta ask: 8x SSD in RAID-0? How fast do you expect that sucker to be able to go? Given that a single SSD should be able to get you 300+ MB/s write and 500 MB/s read, do you expect to be able to use 2.6+ GB/s write and 4 GB/s read? You're bumping into the limits of what even PCIe x8 can theoretically achieve! Or is it just that you need a huge SSD volume?

If you were to boot off a huge device you'd have to partition it so your root filesystem was on a partition within the first TB of the device of course. It's sometimes easier to just put a nice fast SATA3 SSD as the boot drive, and then go from there.
 
thank you for reply BDP !

the reason i need a really fast drive in my machine is because i'm working with 4k footage, very big timelapse sequence and a 64 DSLR camera bullet time rig....(you know the matrix effect...) and therefore being able to just read more than one stream is a challenge by itself.
yesterday i was on a set testing the new camera and believe it or not, one of them, the AATON Penelope Delta, generate 4GB/s when it record... even my promise R6 updated with the latest Ultrastar 15K 600GB could not keep up.

if you have to do a transition between 2 take or a alpha layer of a roto you are soon moving more than 8GB/s ....

PCIe 3.0 on my motherboard can "theoretically" achieve 8GB (even if I highly doubt i will reach anything close) and on a PCIe 2.0 raid HBA it will hit the roof at 4GB/s...."theoretically" but in real world if i can get a steady 2GB/S read/write with incompressible data I'll be in heaven.... 8X 120 gb intel 520 is around 1500$ and the 16 port areca is 800$ so with all the cable i'm getting close to 2500$ for the drive setup.

but :

it's upgradable when the price of the SSD will eventually get down.

I can also use my existing 15K SAS drives as a time machine backup of the raid 0 SSD and connect my 24 tb Raid 6 SAS expender on this same card.

i will still be able top sale it back in 1 year for 1000€ to an rich gamer ! 2,5GB/s and 320 000 iop/s is more than most of the guys need for real....

the idea is to have a scratch disk fast enough to do the export and have the render file calculated on.

dont fool yourself it is a big investment for me, but if i can charge the customers 500$/day for that machine, it will be paying itself very quickly ! A professional motion picture editor is 350/500$/h so if a machine prevent him to get paid watching a progression bar, and get more job done in the same time, they will pay for it.

so far they pay 300$ a day to rent a a Mac Pro 2,26 /16 GB/ 5400rpm 500gb ... and i am pretty sure now that my customac can kick the but to that type of machine in Première and After effect....
 
Fair enough, but I doubt the boot drive needs to be that fast. In terms of ongoing maintenance I would think it would be easier to have a single drive (or a 2-drive stripe if you want) for booting, and then have the RAID controller with a bank of SSDs for the scratch data.

BTW, do you know what the Areca controller's limit will be? It might bottleneck before the PCIe bus depending on the mix of transactions. Hopefully not though.
 
the areca is supposed to be pcie 3.0 and SAS 6G / sata 6G on each drive so theoretically it is good for at least 8 X 600 Gb/s so +/- 4,8 Gb/s but as i told you if i get around 2.5 k i'll be more than happy.

it sound stupid but in my business you cant just say "i built a Hackintosh, because it is cheaper" you have to come with a better reason than that. stupid i know, ... but it is the way it goes....

it's like who is pissing the further after a good party, it's stupid but you can help it !

:headbang::headbang::headbang:
 
the areca is supposed to be pcie 3.0 and SAS 6G / sata 6G on each drive so theoretically it is good for at least 8 X 600 Gb/s so +/- 4,8 Gb/s but as i told you if i get around 2.5 k i'll be more than happy.
Sounds great. Will be interested to see the results when it's all together!
I may eventually replace the plain SATA controllers in my box with a RAID controller, so it's nice to have known-solid options. Please keep us informed.

But hopefully you get better than 2.5 gigabits/second! 2.5 GB/s is a little different to 2.5 Gb/s. :)
 
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