1. Poweredge Expandable Raid Controller Drivers For Mac
2. Dell Perc Raid Controller Software

PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller (PERC) 5/i Manuals: Specs:. Intel IOP333 Processor (11w TDP, 110Tj(max)). 256MB 400MHz ECC Registered DDR2 memory (upgradable.). RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50. PCIe x8. 2 (SFF-8484) SAS internal connectors (support for 8 drives).

LSI Manufactured (and flashable). Xp, Vista 32/64 Supported.

Does not support Native Command Queuing. Does not support 3TB+ drives.

400MHz ECC-registered DIMMs with x16 DRAM components. Installing unsupported memory causes the system to hang at POST. You have to buy x8 or x16 Memory Modules: x8 = 9 Chips (1 ECC) x16 = 5 Chips (1 ECC) For the PERC 5/i, you can find the last drivers/firmware on Dell's website. Look under downloads for the. Latest firmware version: A09 5.2.2-0072 (as of September 5, 2012) Awesome thing is that this $400-700 card can be found on eBay regularly for $100. Since they are so common, there are usually 2-10 on sale at any given time.

If you are looking for RAID5 or improving your RAID performance, this is card to get. The next closest card is going to cost $300+ unless you get lucky. Since SAS is downwards compatible with SATA, you just need the correct cable.

A SAS SFF-8484 to 4xSATA cable runs for $10. Make sure to get pass-through. ICH9R RAID0 w/ Caching 128KB ICH9R RAID0 w/o Caching 128KB PERC RAID0 (Write-Back, Adaptive-Read-Ahead) 128KB PERC RAID0 (Write-Back, Adaptive-Read-Ahead) 1MB PERC RAID0 (Write-Back, Adaptive-Read-Ahead) 8KB The poor performance is probably due to the 64KB block sizes used in the test. The controller had to access 8 sectors to retrive each block. PERC RAID0 128KB JustusIV Benchmarks of PERC 5/i 4x 1TB Samsung Spinpoints F1 RAID0 RAID5 With No Read Ahead RAID5 With Adaptive Read Ahead RAID5 With Read Ahead RAID5 With Write Through RAID5 With Write Back Extra Cooling on My Card CPU Heatsink removed: I used a copper RAMsink on the RAID processor and a Thermaltake Spirit HS for the EC-RAM (courtesy of s1rrah).

The card does get quite hot and I am thinking about replacing the CPU's HS. Stock heatsink routed and cut up pieces of copper from a soldering tip. Prepping an old laptop heatpipe/heatsink (notice the copper bits underneath as gap fillers) Arctic Silver Adhesive to hold it together. That is a great deal! I have used that card in a couple of customer builds and it is the same logic built into the high end Dell Workstations. FYI: In the supermicro mobo's (and possibly others), when doing a large data transfer (500gb+) across multiple drives, that card will get errors unless it is plugged into an x16 slot. (same with the LSI cards) Still trying to find out why from Dell and LSI.

Do these run hot? I know Intel's new dual-core IOP (found on Adeptec's cards) run VERY hot at 80C+. Aftermarket cooling is recommended on those cards since they are known to thermal shutdown. I've seen someone watercool his RAID controller b/c of this.

Though if you need a management over that array from the VM guest system, and not OS X you'll need a computer with working VT-D under OS X and a VM software supporting PCI(E) devices passthrough. This is a way too complicated and this is also means that all arrays on that controller will go to the VM. Another way is where you find a VM software that could pass logical volume (like software RAID volume, not the underneath physical disks) to the ubuntu in it. Looks like Parallels can't do it such way. In final, I don't know how solution works comparing to builtin OS X software RAID, but if it hides actual physical disks from OS X, than it will work even for Parallels. In these two options RAID array management is in the hands of OS X.

Thanks again for your reply. I am wondering, how does OSX see a RAID array from a RAID card? Does it see each disk separately, or the array as a single disk?

Because if the RAID card presents the disks as a single disk to OSX, I think you can give Parallels full control. I will test if I can share a single disk in Ubuntu using Parallels this week before I buy a RAID card. Thanks again! Depends on a kext and a card. My driver doesn't currently support disk passthrough mode, so yes, OS X we'll see an array only as a single disk with any supported controller.

And yes, this means that Parallels should work with such. Well dukzcry, I have been tinkering some more and I think I do not need Ubuntu at all, since OS X has built-in sharing capabilities. There is however something I am wondering about.

If I use a Dell H310 for example, can I initialise the RAID array in the BIOS or will I need to build the array in OS X? And if I build it in OS X, can another OS like Windows read and write to it? So I guess what I am trying to ask is if a RAID array, on for example the Dell H310 card, is OS independent? Thanks again! Exactly you need to create a RAID array either from controller's BIOS or in Windows/Linux.

(There is currently no capability to create/delete arrays from OS X when using this project But you can do monitoring operations with mfiutil console tool supplied with it) After that you can work with your virtual volumes like with usual HDDs, i.e. Doing format, reading, writing, etc from any OS supporting your card. Yes, the one of benefits of a true hardware RAID is that they're OS independent solutions when you have drivers for all OSes you need. Exactly you need to create a RAID array either from controller's BIOS or in Windows/Linux. (There is currently no capability to create/delete arrays from OS X when using this project But you can do monitoring operations with mfiutil console tool supplied with it) After that you can work with your virtual volumes like with usual HDDs, i.e.

Doing format, reading, writing, etc from any OS supporting your card. Yes, the one of benefits of a true hardware RAID is that they're OS independent solutions when you have drivers for all OSes you need. Thanks again for your reply! I will try and find a Dell H310 then and report back here as soon as I do. Thanks again. Dear dukzcry Thanks for all your programming and support! As a confused man by desease I always have problem to understand fully all the hackintosh adaptions but I always fight.

I am in doubt with 2 cards, and if you can help to decide with is best I will be more greatefull, so: LSI 8008ELP 39 Fujitsu LSI1078 that they sar its LSI 8708EM2 (256meg ram) 45us (probably I will pay 150% of taxes because I live in Brazil) So my concerns are about future updates (I am in Mavericks), stability and performance related with: 1 OS X native RAID (for me it has a poor performace (maximum of 100mb/sec with 2 7200 hds) and my board is ga ex58-ud5 2 Sil pcie native card (maximum of 150mb/sec with 2 7200 hds) 3 OSx native FUSION drive. As a confused man by desease I always have problem to understand fully all the hackintosh adaptions but I always fight.

As a fellow deranged individual, here's my setup and suggestion to you: Dell PERC H700 (with LSI chip) can be found on eBay for cheap, which have 512MB of cache. Your Kontakt and sample library are very precious, and so is mine. So get an offsite backup running ASAP; such as CrashPlan or similar. It'll take weeks to upload, so get it running immediately after the install has become stable.

This is important so you don’t have to go through re-encoding processes that take lots of time and can degrade the final version.

Regarding the RAID: The 7-1.5TB HDDs which should be set up as RAID 5 or 6 for speed and redundancy. RAID is NOT a backup!!

It's a matter of redundancy and availability (speed) on a production machine. Those seven drives in a RAID 5 would be seen as a single 9TB volume. In the case of RAID 6, it'd be a 7.5TB Way larger than your sample library. NI Kontakt uses a proprietary compression method for it's samples which, in it's most resent release, shrank 43GB down to 25GB-give or a take a few gigs.

The my advice, you will never fill 7TB with samples, you'll never be able to finish a track for all of your time will be spent going through samples. Are you operating a professional recording studio?

If yes, I would recommend not using a hacked OS. Back to the numbers, seven 1.5TB (RAID5=9TB and RAID6=7.5TB) Let's couple the 9TB or 7.5TB with the other four 2TB drives adding, in a RAID 5 (6TB) or RAID 6 (4TB). You've expressed concerns over array failure so let's play it safe and ditch the motherboard hybrid RAID or OS software RAID. Go with RAID 6 on both cards which equals 11.5TB of storage (7.5TB on one card's array in RAID6 and 4TB on the other, same form).

That is an insane amount of storage for an audio production machine likely in your home studio. On the flip side, you're trying to chase the speed 'dragon.' Shoot for the Dell H700 with 1GB of cache RAM and deploy the CacheCade 2.0 with two SSDs. You can get descent IOs using RAID 5 and/or RAID 6 using only cylindrical drives. You don't need to record to an SSD if your machine's motherboard is loaded with RAM.

You can put both of your SSDs in a RAID 1 or RAID 0 on a hardware RAID card for both boot and record purposes. It'll be lightening fast and since you can do a Time Machine or local backup to the RAID array you created with the seven 1.5TB drives or the four 2TB drives. Which brings me to my setup, similar to whats above. On my GA-Z87X-UD4H with a Dell PERC H700i (512MB RAM) two Samsung 840 256GB SSDs in a RAID 1 for boot, two 2TB WD2003FZEX for personal music and photos, etc., and four 4TB HGST Deskstar NAS drives in a RAID 5.

Great things about the Dell PERCs is, like most, they RAID arrays are expandable and I can move one or more arrays to a new or replacement card should it become necessary. Be it for a failure or the need to expand the RAID 5 array and shift the boot and personal arrays to a new card. What ever you decide to do, get your offsite backup plan immediately. Unless you got Kontakt and your other samples from th3p1r4t3bay, in which case you could steal it again if the machine dies. Thanks for your kind words! Dont worry about backups, I always use Carbon Copy Cloner incremental backups, and always compare and delete my kontakt libs with multi libs shirinked and edited.

Everything with ncw. Raid 5 & 6 are good but CCC show reports of bad files and I just replace them.

In my search I always bypass Dell (I know that perc 5/6 works) because the lots of options and different cables that becames pricier than LSI. I find a Dell h700 for 115us on ebay with shipping (+150% of taxes because I live in Brazil), and its cheaper than LSI 6gb/s but I do not believe that it worth unless I have a raid of ssds in the future.? For the hds I have an old 5u large server case that I modified and it handle 15 3.5 hds (for now). 1 of my raids probably will be with a silicon card + fusion with sdd from osx. Well, me and my pocket will meditate about 6gb/s cards, i know that if you intend to use port multipliers or sdds these are a better idea. Thanks again and hugs from Brazil!

Thanks for your kind words! Dont worry about backups, I always use Carbon Copy Cloner incremental backups, and always compare and delete my kontakt libs with multi libs shirinked and edited. Everything with ncw. Raid 5 & 6 are good but CCC show reports of bad files and I just replace them.

In my search I always bypass Dell (I know that perc 5/6 works) because the lots of options and different cables that becames pricier than LSI. I find a Dell h700 for 115us on ebay with shipping (+150% of taxes because I live in Brazil), and its cheaper than LSI 6gb/s but I do not believe that it worth unless I have a raid of ssds in the future.? For the hds I have an old 5u large server case that I modified and it handle 15 3.5 hds (for now). 1 of my raids probably will be with a silicon card + fusion with sdd from osx. This is going to end here with me since we shouldn't hijack this thread. I addressed your concerns over speed and reliability. RAID 6 will give you TWO drive failues before it becomes a dead array.

Again, not sure what you plan on doing with all this storage (and speed) but you need to be honest with yourself and not want storage just to have storage. You'll go crazy chasing the the 'Gbps Dragon.' The block/stripe size you deploy will play a significant part in speeds with smaller sample files. CCC is good for local but you should have offsite. You seem to be chasing terabytes and Gbps which will cause you to loose focus and inhibit musical creativity. I have a PERC 5i or 6i here. It's yours for free if you want it, just PM me and I'll get it to you ASAP.

Only you'd need to pay for shipping. There is also a Tripp-Lite SAS to SATA cable that's brand new. It's yours for the price I paid $14.67USD. You'll have to look at the specs to see if they're acceptable.

Poweredge Expandable Raid Controller Drivers For Mac

They both work but not sure which FW is loaded. You can read how to deal with the firmware on your own from either Dell or LSI. Now please, begin a new thread to further discuss RAID options and your setup.

This thread belongs to and is regarding his amazing KEXT which makes all this even possible. Just wanted to say again thanks for the work and I love the kext. Might I suggest a GoFundMe for some higher performance cards? SAS 12Gb is looking pretty sweet. I recently came back to this thread for a new build and noticed that in the README that the IBM ServerRAID M1015 had been crossed out. I've been using one of these cards for a while with good results. I couldn't find a specific post that got the card killed, but.

I'd like to give the sleep stuff a shot, but I don't see a Yosemite version with the sleep option available. Could someone post or PM that?

FlavoLSI 8008ELP 39 Can't google info about this card 8708EM2 Mentioned few posts above your post Requires fallback to the legacy interrupts (MSI doesn't work with it) by changing plist flag (see FAQ or mentioned posts). Not sure if there's any noticeable performance penalty with this. Instead of raid 0 or raid 0 + OS X raid you could just use an advanced raid level of a decent hardware raid card. However the latest trend for both speed and data safety was usage of a ZFS with RAIDZ. For this you don't need a hardware raid card but you need a good controller without bottlenecks. It could be either a separate pci controller supported by OS X or your mobo controller if it's good enough and has enough hdd connectors.

See project for this. They also have a good forum. You could ask a setup suggestion for your needs there. Also I hope you're more than satisfied with great feedback from jfive. Hi, justroach. I recently came back to this thread for a new build and noticed that in the README that the IBM ServerRAID M1015 had been crossed out.

I've been using one of these cards for a while with good results. I couldn't find a specific post that got the card killed, but. At least: If you could write the revision of your card, used firmware etc etc I think it could help people and after getting one more positive report on that card we may consider it a compatible card again I'd like to give the sleep stuff a shot, but I don't see a Yosemite version with the sleep option available. Could someone post or PM that? I've just used an old kexts on Yosemite. There were no API changes in 10.10, so Mavericks kexts should just work for you too. Here's on how to bypass kext signature checking in Yosemite.

Dell Perc Raid Controller Software

Hi, ElStuiterbal. Do you boot OS X with kext-dev-mode=1 kernel flag? Because you should! If this doesn't help you may also try to manually load it in booted system via 'kextutil -v /path/to/SASMegaRAID.kext'. This should print you what's going wrong.

Hi dukzcy, Sorry for my late reply. Hi dukzcry, first of all: thanks a lot for your work and effort put into this project - it is very much appreciated!!! And also a thanks to the rest of this community around here - been reading for years, never had to ask a question, thanks to the brave people asking for support here before I came to the hackintosh playground. Now I'm stuck with setting up a PERC 6/i Integrated on Yosemite 10.10.3 To be honest, this is the first time I'm messing around with raid-devices und such, so there might be a fundamental lack of knowledge regarding this subject on my side.

Please forgive me, as I'm here to learn. I managed to get my hands on a PERC 6/i Integrated, which I prepared with some non-electrical tape (as mentioned in the first post - to get it to boot). File owner /permissions are incorrect (must be root:wheel, nonwritable by group /other ) Please do cp -r / Volumes /EFI /EFI /CLOVER /kexts / 10.10 / SASMegaRAID.kext /tmp; chown -R root:wheel /tmp/ SASMegaRAID.kext; kextutil -v /tmp/ SASMegaRAID.kext Thanks for your help. However, I still did not manage to get the kext to work. Please forgive me for maybe not understanding the basics, since I am new to Mac programming. I did follow your commands and got the following output: YTBs-iMac: root# kextutil -v /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext Defaulting to kernel file '/System/Library/Kernels/kernel' Diagnostics for /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext: Code Signing Failure: not code signed /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext appears to be loadable (not including linkage for on-disk libraries).

Kext-dev-mode allowing invalid signature -67062 0xFFFFFFFFFFFEFA0A for kext '/tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext' Loading /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext. /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext successfully loaded (or already loaded). After that, I copied the kext from /tmp to my EFI partition and checked the permissions again, but still no luck. Any idea how to fix this? YTBs-iMac: root# cp -r /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.10 YTBs-iMac: root# kextutil -v /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.10/SASMegaRAID.kext Defaulting to kernel file '/System/Library/Kernels/kernel' Diagnostics for /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.10/SASMegaRAID.kext: Authentication Failures: File owner/permissions are incorrect (must be root:wheel, nonwritable by group/other): /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.10/SASMegaRAID.kext.DSStore Contents Info.plist.Info.plist MacOS SASMegaRAID.SASMegaRAID.MacOS.Contents Code Signing Failure: not code signed.

Hi, just a few points (always good to know) 1.) OSX (I think with 10.9) started to sign kext-files, so only 'valid' drivers would be loaded during startup. That's why you should use the kernel-argument ' kext-dev-mode=1' - because the kernel being in 'developer-mode' will load kext-files even without a valid signature (which you will only get from Apple-certified software, I'd guess) 2.) OSX (I think with 10.7 or 10.8) started to use kernel-cache files. Essentially these files contain all your hardware's needs in regards to drivers (eg. Try to picture it this way: if you don't have certain kind of hardware in your box, there is no need to for the OS to provide kexts for (meaning loading the stuff into memory would be useless, because drivers will never be needed) - to make use of this concept, OSX builds a kernel-cache file with all drivers included to start up your individual hardware. Hi, just a few points (always good to know). Placing the kext on your main HDD in '/System/Library/Extensions' you'd need to set permissions on the kext (e.g. 'chown -Rv root:wheel./some.kext && chmod 755 -Rv./some.kext' - replace some.kext with your needs when in /S/L/E) and then REBUILD KERNEL CACHE (which I don't remember the command now - google should help you) to get the kext loaded on next startup.

(loading kexts without booting is possible too, read through this thread, it's written down somewhere) hope to clear things up a little bit - happy hackintosh'ing Cheers glotzer Thank you very much for your reply glotzer! I will try tomorrow to just install the kext in S/L/E. However, I would prefer to use Clover to inject the kext, to keep S/L/E as vanilla as possible. Your explanation on the working principles of kexts and OSX does really help, which I find very interesting. However, could you explain why other kexts work if they are injected by Clover? Hi, Have you tried solutions for ' device doesn't show up in profiler' and ' contiguous drive enumeration' in FAQ?

Does any of these change anything for you? You may also try to combine them if any single solution doesn't change the things./ tmp / SASMegaRAID. Kext successfully loaded ( or already loaded ). Obviously this means that your kext was loaded:-) Please look at dmesg and Profiler after such successful load. Your dmesg buffer should have similar info messages akin to what posted. Next comes look at Profiler (Parallel SCSI section) and Disk Utility.

You should see at least your controller in Profiler; and volume(s) in both utilities, if you have created any virtual disk in your controller bios. If you're stuck in the middle, try what was suggested to. Ah, and post things like your dmesg etc here so it will be more easy to figure what's going on. As for kext loading, made a great explanation. I will try tomorrow to just install the kext in S/L/E No need, you already successfully loaded the kext;-) Keep on testing like I described few paragraphs before.

However, could you explain why other kexts work if they are injected by Clover? However, I would prefer to use Clover to inject the kext, to keep S/L/E as vanilla as possible. Probably because no other non-storage related kext require this. Local-Root This kext is required to mount root on a local volume—for example, the storage family, disk drivers, or file systems. And thanks to dukzcry's hint, this makes perfectly sense now - good one, me just didn't see the forest because of all those trees. What confuses me is that SASMegaRAID 3 of PDs present You have 3 physical disks attached to a raid card.

mfi0 Configuration: 1 arrays, 1 volumes, 0 spares array 0 of 2 drives Only two of which are used in a raid array. Have you ever tried to disconnect non-involved one(s) from the card?

might this be an issue at all? As far as I understand, running the PERC 6/i in a PCIe 4x slot will just impact transfer rate Not likely. I'm more with your last sentence. You may also try io debug and full debug kexts and compare kernel buffer messages on when you use just that that old 100 gb drive and when you use 2x 2 tb drives (meanwhile, what about creating raid0 of single 2 tb drive or raid 1 of both? Does it work?) to see where it stucks with your 4 tb raid volume.

Am I right that it works fine on your side under another OS, like Windows? Tearing my hair out here.

Finally went for a 9260-8i. Built it up on a DZ77GA-70K with Yosemite and Clover. Created a virtual device. No drive though.

RAID 0, 1, 5, and 6. System information shows the device (LUN Address: 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00), but Disk Utility doesn't. WTF am I doing wrong? Any help would be greatly appreciated. LSI 9260-8i FW= 12.15.0-0205 Latest Yosemite and Clover.

Mfiutil sees the volumes just fine. Tried flipping PreferMSI with no difference. Tried uncontiguous enumeration with no difference. TIA for any help. UPDATE: I swapped a known working card into the system and experienced the same results. I took the non-working 9260 out and put it into a known working system and everything worked. @ I think you may be into something.

I think some of these desktop board's PLX PCIe switching is causing problems. I noticed when the card was in the x16 slot for the GPU would show as x8. I was using a GTX580, BTW. I didn't try the small drives like you had, but as I mentioned the problem followed the motherboard and not the card. Lspci showing any unknown PLX devices? @ dukzcry Any idea how we could troubleshoot or test that theory? Hello Insanelymac, I've successfully installed Mac OS X Sierra on 2 32gb flash drives with them as a JBOD Raid.

I can only get into the hackintosh if I use another USB flash drive with Clover installed on it. I've tried using a clover installer however that just installs on my Raid Disk. I've also noticed that when I open clover configurator, there are 2 EFI partitions but both of them were empty. I've tried moving the contents of the EFI on my Raid disk that clover installed but my BIOS does not detect it. Also when I use the other flash drive to boot into clover, there is another volume called 'BOOT OS X' right next to my Raid Disk Volume that I use to boot from.

I just want to install and boot off of my Raid usb flash drives. Really running out of options, Thanks guys.