The Mac Pro RAID Card offers improved storage performance and data protection to your Mac Pro system — up to 553MB/s of sequential read performance in RAID 0. Ideal for video and creative professionals with demanding storage needs as well as for tower server applications, this hardware RAID option supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 0+1, and Enhanced JBOD. It has 512MB of cache and an integrated 72-hour battery for protecting the RAID cache. The card occupies the top PCI Express slot (slot 4) and connects to the four internal drive bays.

With the Mac Pro RAID Card installed, high-performance 15,000-rpm SAS drives may be used. SAS drives are sold separately and available with the Promise 450GB SAS Drive for Mac Pro.

To enable your Mac Pro for hardware RAID, install the Mac Pro RAID Card and two or more hard drives in bays 1 through 4. Each RAID level has minimum requirements for the number of hard drives:

RAID Level	Drive Requirements	Benefit
Enhanced JBOD	One to four drives	A non-RAID configuration with the ability to migrate to a RAID set at any time
RAID 0 (striping)	Two to four hard drives	Maximum performance and capacity for the most demanding I/O requirements
RAID 1 (mirroring)	Two hard drives	Maximum protection for critical data
RAID 5	Three or four hard drives	Data protection, high performance,, and efficient capacity utilization
RAID 0+1	Four hard drives	A mirror of striped drive pairs providing performance and data protection

The Mac Pro RAID Card supports the creation of multiple RAID sets in a system and multiple volumes per RAID set. For optimal disk utilization in a RAID set, all hard drives should be the same size. Using Apple's RAID Utility software (included with Mac OS X v10.5), you can migrate the drives into a RAID set without reinstalling Mac OS X or reformatting the drives, and you can customize your RAID volumes to meet your exact requirements.

Requires Mac Pro (early 2009) and Mac OS X v10.5.6 or later.