X Marks the Spot: Upgrading to Hardware Raid Protection.

X Marks the Spot: Upgrading to hardware Raid Protection.
The one thing that is not included with the Mac Pro is a RAID card. Apples sells one for about $700, but honestly don’t waste your money. While the apple raid card will support SAS drives, this is only 1 of the 2 perk compared to the CalDigit Raid Card. I actually purchased the APPLE Raid Card but returned it because it had no support for boot camp, was not as fast as cheaper Raid cards, and the features were lacking. I recently discovered CalDigit, which has been making external storage and raid cards for Apple computers for quite some time. The CalDigit Raid Card is faster, supports Boot Camp (additional cable required), and can support up to 16 drives (4 internal, 12 external) via 2 eSTAT ports on the back of the card. The Caldigit Card comes with Raid Shield software, a Java based UI for configuring the card. The software has some very cool features not normally seen in desktop raid software. For example, I have 3 X 750GB internal drives for data, but prior to the raid card I had my data on a software raid mirror, so once I installed the card, I created a Raid 1 Array using the spare no data drive, and one of the data drives. Then I connected the remaining data drive to the Mac Pro’s Mother board via the SATA cable included with the Caldigit Raid Card. Booted OS X 10.5.6 and copied my data to the Raid Array. Now that my data was safe, I used the Raid Shield to Migrate from Raid 1 to Raid 5, but adding the last data drive to the array, a few hours later the Raid Array was completely initialized as Raid 5, and all my Data remained. Its worth noting if you have a software raid, you need to break the software mirror first or it confuses the hell out of the raid card. The only other perk the Apple Raid Card has is that you can easily boot to a drive on the raid card. Because the CalDigit Raid Card is connected to all 4 drive bays via the iPass Cable, I had some difficulty getting the system to boot consistently to the drive on the raid card. The OS drive was not raided. I final result was to remove my second optical bay, and use the supplied drive rails, and SATA cable to move my OS drive to the on board SATA port. Once I did this I was very happy, and Now I have another open Drive bay for more Raid Space, Yippee more heat!