Unlike the earlier RAID card, the 2009 one also supports sleep.)įurther, when Bare Feats benchmarked the Mac Pro RAID Card, it discovered that the tested alternatives were all faster than Apple’s $700 card.
In fact, unless the battery is fully charged, the buffer is disabled – charging the battery can take up to 12 hours! (According to Bare Feats, the 2009 version of the card allows full-speed writes while the battery is charging. But if the battery is dead, the buffer is worthless. One unusual feature of the Mac Pro RAID Card is a rechargeable battery that keeps the 512 KB write buffer alive and supplies power to the SATA or SAS drives should the Mac Pro ever lose power. It requires Mac OS X 10.5.6 Leopard or later with the Early 2009 Mac Pro, 10.6.4 Snow Leopard with the Mid 2010 Mac Pro, and 10.7.3 Lion with the Mid 2012 model. The 2009 version of the Mac Pro RAID Card is compatible with all Mac Pro models from 2009 through 2012.
