Raid & HBA Controller - Areca ARC-1882ix-24 - Atto H60F - HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SG

[Panamamax]

Good day!

My Only and biggest hobby i have is Photo & Videography since many years...
I use MacBooks and an 2008 Mac Pro since more then 10 years now. before i used to build my PC´s by myself and i would say i have a general understanding of whats going on inside a PC / Mac.

I used to use a Drobo 5D as my Datahorse, connected to my MacBooks that i keep updated normally every 3 years or so.

i moved with my Canon to the Magic lantern Firmware and i started to record all my videos in Raw...
Thats about 90Mb/s of movie and a lot of data...

With the higher demand of storage, storage speeds and Hardware power, the only logical step was to move toward to build myself a nicely Hacktintosh that will fulfill my needs.

I am planing to make a full post of my hardware i used etc... however today i only want to focus on the issues i Had with my raid Controlers...

i was looking a lot for compatible raid controllers, however i could barely find something about Raid controllers and Hackintosh. the only Card that i was finding something was the HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SG that i bought. Since it is fairly cheap (about 150$) not much could go wrong:




1. HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SG

This Raid card allows you to connect up to 8 Sata drives to the 2 SAS ports it has. the Card has Raid5 function but not raid 6. It will work Out of the box and can be accessed and configured through a web surface in Safari. i used it like two month long and had function wise no big issues. i realized though that the read and write speeds get quite low (about 150-200Mb/s) once it was about 60% full... you can start to maintenance the Raid set witch took like a week and afterwards the speed was up again. However i figured out that during high IO operation the speed was still in the 200mb/s range nomather what. This and the fact that only 8 drives could be connected lead me to the next card.

2. Atto Express SAS H60F

I bought this card second hand on ebay thinking it would be the Raid card R60F. as it turned out it was the HBA card H60F as it was correctly described on ebay. The card does not have any Raid functionality and only provides you with 4 more SAS ports that can connect up to 16 SATA drives. The Website of ATTO does provide drivers & support for Mac OSX as well as youtube videos with explanations. The Card was working flawlessly in my hackintosh and i connected 13 Sata drives to it and played around with SoftRaid 5 and Raid0, i managed up to 1,5Gb/s in Raid 0 as a test, however since it didn't had any Raid function i discard that option again and will soon sell the card again on ebay. After my miss buy of the ATTO i did some further Study and finally bought the:

3. Areca ARC-1882ix-24

This card i bought again for a nice price on Ebay in the 4Gb ram version. it offers 6 SAS ports to internally connect up to 24 SATA drives, as well as an external SAS port to connect a external JBOD case or something like that. i also bought an old Supermicro Server with 24 internal drive bays, where i will use the Case and the backplane and fit my current Hackintosh there. im now using 16x4TB raid6 (56TB useable) as my only drive and make backups with a bunch of old 2TB and 3TB drives that are in external enclosures. My idea is to install 8 of those external drives in the remaining free slots of my server case to get rid of 6+ external enclosures with power adapters and usb cables while im making backups...

The web side promises OSX support for 10.9 and 10.10. The installation of the card was again plug and play... i downloaded the drivers from the web side, i installed the card, connected the driver and could access the setup of the card either through a web surface in Safari or before booting in the BIOS of the card by pushing a key combination. i Setup a Raid 6 with 16x4TB seagate desktop drives. after the initialization that took around 8h the disk utility told me that it found an unformatted drive, i formatted it in HFS and since then i have a 56Tb drive that works in Raid 6. im just in the process of copying all my backup data from my external backups back to my Raid, so far it showed very nice speeds (700mb/s writing feeded by 5 external HDD´s connected through USB3) Once everything is copied i will make some speed tests and will let you know my results.

I hope i could be a bit of a help for somebody that is also looking for a raid solution on his Hackintosh...

For question don't hesitate to ask me any time!
Saludos
Max

PS: Here the tested Hardware:

http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/series_rr272x.htm
http://www.attotech.com/products/product.php?sku=ESAS-H60F-000
http://www.areca.us/products/1882.htm

And this is the case im waiting to arrive (will have it around mid January in my Hands)
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/846/SC846A-R900.cfm

 

[Hasslethehoff]

That is amazing that you posted this today and I'm googling for info about the Highpoint vs. Areca for a hackintosh install and here it is.

I was planning on an Areca 1224-8i but I will check eBay for the newer model as you found.

Thank you!

 

[Panamamax]

i was looking all over the place and could not find nothing... now my whole data is on the Raid6 and i made some benchmarks that you can find attached. Since my Card has 4Gb of DDR3 Ram (a normal DDR3 ECC Ram Module build on the card) it kind of tricks the benchmarks if the amount of data written during the test is close to the 4Gb.

Normaly i use the Blackmagic disk test tool but i guess its getting confused and the biggest amount of data written is 5Gb. I therefore moved to test the speed with AJA and there you can go from 128Mb to 16Gb. I did all the possible amount of data and you can see nicely the effect of the RAM getting away the higher the data package goes. but anyway.... having a 1,6+ GB/s speed in Raid 6 is just amazing. that is about a 100MB/s per disk. i also have a set of two 1TB SSD´s in software Raid0 but the Areca leaves them far behind (as we speak of MB/s not IO)

 

[vlad1966]

Hello Panamamax,

Thanks for all your great info.

I used to own the 2720SGL a couple of weeks ago but sold it mainly because I didn't like the wait (probably 10 seconds) during system boot, when the card would check the RAID configuration. It was very annoying.

I'll be looking to buy an Areca RAID card, though one of the ARC-12xx series.
Can you tell me if there is any delay similar to the 2720SGL on the Areca card when it initializes during system boot?

Thanks!

 

[Panamamax]

Yes it is similar to the Highpoint... it has an countdown that he counts while he is loading his bios... with 8 Drives connected to 2 SAS ports it took me 17 seconds of countdown + about 10 seconds of loading (where he tells me to enter the cards bios, etc...) Now with 16 drives it takes about 45 seconds +10 seconds... the max. countdown is showed to be 300 seconds.... but as i told you mine gets ready after about 45...

I just get used to it, and the minute i loose i get back the first time i copy files around

 

[jadik]

Many thanks for your well documented journey... The Areca card sounds ideal, but comes with a serious price tag. The eBay pricing I found (2015/08/21) was about $550 for the 12 port, $700 for the 16 port & $950 for the 24 port. A good deal cheaper than the new product prices ($860/12-port, $1000/16-port, $1150/24 port), but still quite expensive.

Your review suggests you have been thrilled with the performance, however, although it doesn't mention what you paid for your 24-port card. Is it fair to assume you spent a similar amount as the current listings? Would you do it again, or differently?

Thanks again,
Jadik

 

[aminorjourney]

i was looking all over the place and could not find nothing... now my whole data is on the Raid6 and i made some benchmarks that you can find attached. Since my Card has 4Gb of DDR3 Ram (a normal DDR3 ECC Ram Module build on the card) it kind of tricks the benchmarks if the amount of data written during the test is close to the 4Gb.

Normaly i use the Blackmagic disk test tool but i guess its getting confused and the biggest amount of data written is 5Gb. I therefore moved to test the speed with AJA and there you can go from 128Mb to 16Gb. I did all the possible amount of data and you can see nicely the effect of the RAM getting away the higher the data package goes. but anyway.... having a 1,6+ GB/s speed in Raid 6 is just amazing. that is about a 100MB/s per disk. i also have a set of two 1TB SSD´s in software Raid0 but the Areca leaves them far behind (as we speak of MB/s not IO)


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This is stunning work!

I'm in the process of researching RAID cards for my hackintosh, primarily because I know that disk speed has been a bottleneck for my system thus far.

I know that OSX doesn't offer any native boot support for this card, but I'm wondering if you can boot it using a modified BIOS? I've got HFS+ read capabilities in my Bios (via OZMOSIS) and it seems to just work perfectly.

I can see this card on ebay now for about $500 each, so I'm interested to know if you have any thoughts about good pricing.

Nikki.