Forums | MacLife

This isn't super hackerish other than the minor modifications to the eSATA and the pain that moving 8 HDs from my G5 to my Mac Pro caused.

Anyhow I opted for SoftRaid for the ability to migrate between systems and the fact OS X can give RAID status rather easily, no 3rd party utilities needed. Soft RAID isn't as fast but its better supported.

However my G5 has a RAID5 capable eSATA card, which sadly isn't bootable which sorta ruins the point of my RAID... to have a large bootable volume for caching and more importantly redundancy .


Seagate Barracuda ES.2 500 GB HDs (4x)


Xbench 1.3

G5 single Drive (60% full)

System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.4.11 (8S165)
Physical RAM 4608 MB
Model PowerMac7,3
Processor PowerPC G5x2 @ 2.00 GHz
L1 Cache 64K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 2.00 GHz
Bus Frequency 1 GHz
Video Card ATY,R420
Drive Type :

Results 42.58

Sequential 79.35
Uncached Write 70.16 43.07 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 76.02 43.01 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 88.55 25.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 85.40 42.92 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 29.10
Uncached Write 9.50 1.01 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 89.96 28.80 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 81.03 0.57 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 113.67 21.09 MB/sec [256K blocks]

G5 (eSATA)
Generic eSATA case (passthrough SATA to ESATA)
http://www.cooldrives.com/qudropbayese.html

FirmTek SeriTek/1eVE4 (Bootable too!)
Softraid 1+0 (4x drive) (41% full)

Disk Test 70.48
Sequential 65.56
Uncached Write 55.03 33.79 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 54.14 30.63 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 46.86 13.71 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 329.55 165.63 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 76.21
Uncached Write 34.11 3.61 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 91.28 29.22 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 154.23 1.09 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 174.59 32.40 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Mac Pro, internal SATA
Softraid 1+0 (4x drive) (47% full)

Results 115.36
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.3 (9D34)
Physical RAM 6144 MB
Model MacPro3,1
Drive Type SuperDrive
Disk Test 115.36
Sequential 167.82
Uncached Write 264.18 162.20 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 274.00 155.03 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 73.70 21.57 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 353.22 177.52 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 87.89
Uncached Write 32.63 3.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 288.73 92.43 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 158.06 1.12 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 196.90 36.54 MB/sec [256K blocks]


The Mac Pro is a clear winner, notably there are some differences... the Mac Pro was internal vs eSATA and G5 was running Tiger instead of Leapord. Whatever the case, the G5 several struggled on write speeds. The strange part is the G5 took a write performance but held its own again the Mac Pro. What can be said is the RAID1+0 offers more than double the performance of a single drive from Mac Pro to G5 and likely near the same Mac Pro to Mac Pro.


So is it worth it?
Well... depends on how valuable your data is, the best solution would be to run RAID1 (Mirror), it won't protect you from human error but you'll get an exact duplicate drive and improved read times at the minor cost of write times and single drive. There's also time Machine which lets your roll back but I'm as far as I understand if you lose your boot drive, you cannot do a full boot drive restore from time machine.

Last edited by Greg Grant (2008-06-21 4:07 am)