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SAS card for G5Quad
- Thread starter Tratkazir_the_1st
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@randomdamage
Did you also get a bit deeper into the further capabilities of the LSI Utility? I. e. did you tinker around with Raid-configurations or do you know if custom setups with the ports are possible. I. e. ports 0 and 1 together for a Raid 0 and the other ports for independent drives.
Could be a way to speed things up even a bit more.
Did you also get a bit deeper into the further capabilities of the LSI Utility? I. e. did you tinker around with Raid-configurations or do you know if custom setups with the ports are possible. I. e. ports 0 and 1 together for a Raid 0 and the other ports for independent drives.
Could be a way to speed things up even a bit more.
So I wonder if the Kernel from Mac OS X Tiger Server can work with regular Tiger?
Maybe that would resolve the symbols errors.
Maybe that would resolve the symbols errors.
So playing continues... ...with some news! 😎
Couldn't hold back to take these two crappy SanDisk "Ultra"s and create a RAID Zero with them connected to the two free ports of the SAS-card.
So here are the numbers...
![Standard.jpg]( "Standard.jpg")
![Large.jpg]( "Large.jpg")
![Extended.jpg]( "Extended.jpg")
Not quite as impressive in xBench...
![xBench RAID.png]( "xBench RAID.png")
...compared to a single disk.
![xBench Single Disk.png]( "xBench Single Disk.png")
...but maybe the more important message: This thing also boots! 🤩
![About.jpg]( "About.jpg")
So might easily be one of the fastest storages ever to boot a Powermac into Mac OSX!
In my case it wasn't very reliable. Rebooted once with no reason before it reached the desktop. And another time had a hang and lost the booting device alltogether. But this again is more likely a thing with those crappy SanDisks, which the LSI does not seem to like to much. I bet, with some more quality in case of SSDs, it would boot every time without any issues.
So, if anybody has four spare disks, one of these cards and a little time to waste, 1.000 MB/s, bootable in a Quad G5 should be the mark to hit!
Couldn't hold back to take these two crappy SanDisk "Ultra"s and create a RAID Zero with them connected to the two free ports of the SAS-card.
So here are the numbers...
Not quite as impressive in xBench...
...compared to a single disk.
...but maybe the more important message: This thing also boots! 🤩
So might easily be one of the fastest storages ever to boot a Powermac into Mac OSX!
In my case it wasn't very reliable. Rebooted once with no reason before it reached the desktop. And another time had a hang and lost the booting device alltogether. But this again is more likely a thing with those crappy SanDisks, which the LSI does not seem to like to much. I bet, with some more quality in case of SSDs, it would boot every time without any issues.
So, if anybody has four spare disks, one of these cards and a little time to waste, 1.000 MB/s, bootable in a Quad G5 should be the mark to hit!
Point 21 of the main menu of the utility shown here, the same that has to be used to set the minimum link speed, looks promising in that case. But checking would involve swapping the card back to the PC. And at the moment i am happy having everything set up nicely and PC is in the basement again. 😕since having a hardware RAID card would remove the CPU overhead of a software raid
So maybe any of the other owners can give this a shot. But i have some doubts there will be much more performance to gain.
Try true SAS SSDs for this
.BTW, as I suspected - there are no SilverStone enclosures at our local markets, so I've got 2 sets of this things https://gembird.nl/item.aspx?id=4840 (Gembird MF-321, if link broken). Hope to try them today (Friday evening) or on weekend
.
Given that the Quad tops out at 800 MB/s using the four-lane Samsung SM951 (which can do much more in a PCIe 2.0/3.0 system), I don’t think the SAS card will be faster than that. But... what kind of "total" speeds do you get when testing both the SAS array and the SM951 at the same time?
since having a hardware RAID card would remove the CPU overhead of a software raid
This SAS card doesn't have a CPU of its own, i.e. it's not a hardware RAID card.
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Oh yes! Completely forgot about this limitation. Thanks for mentioning. So it wouldn't make any sense to add more disks to the RAID than one more max.
I am not planning or recommend using a striped RAID as a boot drive anyway. The xBench score above confirms once again the weaknesses of this strategy another test on my Pro 5,1 with some NVMe-card allready showed: At random transactions with small chunks of data, the RAID's performance even falls back behind a single disk! And this is just the typical use scenario, a boot/system-drive has to deal with. So in the end, most of it is just for the benchmarks or a proof of concept. 😕
Sadly cannot check anymore at the moment as i went back to the optical drive. But is this possible anyway? At least in the SpeedTools i can not run more than one disk-benchmark at a time.
Also would such a test, if even possible, make any sense? Does this ever happen in real life: The machine trying to access two differend storage sources at the very same time?
Is this really the case? My thinking was, the chipset would be doing this. So why does it offer RAID-settings in the utility?
Not at the moment. I'm at the limit of wasting time and money just to play around again...Try true SAS SSDs for this
...after not beeing able to resist ordering one of those supernice SilverStone boxes! 😁
Yes, that's a more simple way. But don't they hold only one 2.5"-drive each? So it will get you only two drives into the HDD-area of a G5 while you asked for a solution to mount four?so I've got 2 sets of this things https://gembird.nl/item.aspx?id=4840 (Gembird MF-321, if link broken). Hope to try them today (Friday evening) or on weekend
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You can make a copy of
QuickBench.app and lauch two instances of it that way. I haven't checked if this allows bench'ing two disks at the same time yet.It would help establish whether 800 MB/s is the limit for just one four-lane slot, i.e. if transfers using the other four-lane slot would simply be added to that, if that makes sense.
I was wrong (sorry!). This whitepaper says the card does have "hardware RAID", i.e. doesn't use the host's CPU. But this thread reports OS X (Lion) doesn't recognise the RAID volumes defined in the utility, so...
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I went some other way (okay, in the end similar, but using existing stuff):
I opened Quickbench 4, part of SpeedTools Utilities Pro 3.6, and let it run 10 cycles trough the extend test with the AHCI disk. At the same time i hat QuickBench 2.1.2, part of SpeedTools Utilities 2.3, open, running a standard test for the startup disk, connectet to the SAS.
Aside of QuickBench sending an error as it does not like to be put in the background, results differed less than 10 MB/s from what was expected for both of the tests. And that not even consistent. So it could really just be from not running as the frontmost app.
So my conclusion would be yes, it would just add up!
So - in theory - plugging two of this cards in the Quad with three SSDs connected to each and then creating a striped RAID of these 6 disks "should" get you 1.5 GB/s (overhead allready deducted) able to boot a G5.
I am afraid, not really!
As mentioned before, i wouldn't recommend booting a RAID 0 in general. And furthermore, given that i run all my apps and user data of the AHCI, but just the OS of the (in this case SATA II speed) SSD and regarding all the G5's other limitations, there would not be any noticeable difference in "real life"-performance...
...as a benefit for all the hassle with two cards and six disks. To my opinion, just to much effort, just to see some "impressive" numbers in some benchmarks.
I have some doubts in this making that much of a difference anyway. I was positively surprised of the single disk speed nearly exactly scaled up for the RAID, just created with the Mac's disk utility. So what more could be expected than double of what a single disk offers?
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Thanks for posting the links anyway! 👍
I wonder where you keep finding all that stuff all the time. 😛
Edit: Just had a look into this whitepaper. And now i am glad and proud about what i have being "top of the line"! 😂
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It doesn't make much sense. I was just interested in seeing what kind of results you get to be honest.
Yeah, an on-board CPU would make more sense when you're running RAID 5... which the card can't do. So it seems a bit gimmicky to me, just to be able to say "Even our low-cost HBAs have a CPU!".
Just searchin' the interwebz
Looks trustworthy like you had been following all those threads for years! 😂Just searchin' the interwebz
What's even the real advantage of RAID 5 over RAID 0? You need at least three disks and, if two of them fail, you ar still f**ed! Even with the disadvantages in writespeed and capacity.
On my Pro for the media library i just use a RAID 0, running a daily backup.
Thery are declared as 2x2,5" drives in 1 3,5" bay. It really so, but you'll need 2 notebook sized drives\SSDs or 1 full-height SAS HDD + 7mm. other drive (HDD\SAS). Pics included
. (Sorry for poor quality, something happened to phone camera software). (I'll look for powered SAS cable to avoid adapter sas+power->sata+power, the one I used is not reliable.)Attachments
Ah, so the pic on the shop's site not showing "the real thing", just having one line of screwholes.Thery are declared as 2x2,5" drives in 1 3,5" bay. It really so, but you'll need 2 notebook sized drives\SSDs or 1 full-height SAS HDD + 7mm. other drive (HDD\SAS). Pics included
So here is a little news on the LSI SAS card in the G5 with a PCI to PCI-E bridge.
10.5.8 Kernel Panics and a bunch of stuff scrolls by too fast to be read, but I assume the the LSI driver probing the device. However no useful info for any extension in the backtrace that maybe causing the panic.
The device does show up in Open Firmware and the FCODE ROM is loaded. However OPT-boot( boot-picker ) does not detect a bootable SATA SSD ).
10.5.4 Install DVD image does boot and the SATA SSD connected to the SAS card does show up in the Disk Utility.
More to come later........
10.5.8 Kernel Panics and a bunch of stuff scrolls by too fast to be read, but I assume the the LSI driver probing the device. However no useful info for any extension in the backtrace that maybe causing the panic.
The device does show up in Open Firmware and the FCODE ROM is loaded. However OPT-boot( boot-picker ) does not detect a bootable SATA SSD ).
10.5.4 Install DVD image does boot and the SATA SSD connected to the SAS card does show up in the Disk Utility.
More to come later........
I'm installing 10.5.4 onto the SAS connected SATA SSD now, seems to be going without issue so far.
Will update in about 30 min..............
The drive connected doesn't show up in the boot-picker, but you can select it in the Startup Disk app in OS X and it will boot from the drive connect to the SAS card.
I see you are using 10.5.9 here so the issue I'm having with 10.5.8 is likely related to the PCI to PCI-E bridge in my G5.
Hopeful I can try the LSI driver from 10.5.4 with 10.5.8 and that will fix the kernel panic with 10.5.8, but we'll see....
The SSD connect to the SAS card booted just fine into 10.5.4.
Just a quick and dirty in QuickBench shows 95 MB/s reads and 77/s MB writes as peeks, but spotlight is indexing the drives so I'll try and update those numbers if they change once SL is done.
That's far better than I've seen with the SIL3112 and this drive in any PPC system.
The drive itself peaks around 500MB/s in a PC with native SATA6.
Still 95MB/s is pretty damned good for 33Mhz PCI, there is always going to be some overhead and we have the added overhead of the PCI to PCI-E bridge. 95MB/s is faster than I've seen any benchmark of any PCI card before, so we are likely close to what 33Mhz PCI can do in reality.
Sadly there seems to be an issue with the USB watchdog reporting dead ports in both a QS G4 and MDD G4 with this LSI card.
It will not boot in the QS due to some conflict in 10.5.4 with the AppleMPIC driver.
It will boot in the MDD, but I lose the USB Keyboard. However the drive peaks faster in the MDD than the G5( 106MB/s reads and 88Mb/s writes.
I hate this, I was hoping we had found a replacement for the SIL3112 in G4 systems, but there is some sort of conflict.
So I would say if you want a SAS card for your PCI equipped G5 with 4 ports, this card should be just fine.
However for G4 towers I'd avoid it and try and get a Sonnet PCI SATA card or the FirmTek card.
It will not boot in the QS due to some conflict in 10.5.4 with the AppleMPIC driver.
It will boot in the MDD, but I lose the USB Keyboard. However the drive peaks faster in the MDD than the G5( 106MB/s reads and 88Mb/s writes.
I hate this, I was hoping we had found a replacement for the SIL3112 in G4 systems, but there is some sort of conflict.
So I would say if you want a SAS card for your PCI equipped G5 with 4 ports, this card should be just fine.
However for G4 towers I'd avoid it and try and get a Sonnet PCI SATA card or the FirmTek card.
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