After reading Howard Oakley's in-depth labs on Raid arrays you'd be forgiven for wondering why another Raid storage product is being put under the microscope. But the 3ware Sidecar Kit is not just another Raid box, it is a combination of the 3ware Sidecar enclosure itself and the obscurely-named 9650SE-4LPME, a 'multi-lane, high-bandwidth' 3Gb SATA II Raid controller PCI-Express expansion card. This card requires a last-generation Power Mac G5 or a Mac Pro in order to work, so make sure you have the appropriate compatible Mac before you even consider this product. A Power Mac G5 with PCI-X won't do.
The 3ware Sidecar box is just narrow enough to sit on top of a Mac Pro tower, something that's shown in the manual. Watch out for the power cable though, as it is barely high enough to clear the handles without being pushed out of place. The Raid controller card itself fits into any free PCI-Express slot. You're alerted to the possibility of overheating by placing it next to other similar cards, but in fact that's a standard warning for this kind of product.
Configuring the 3ware Sidecar is done through a web interface, and the device itself is controlled using a separate 'chassis control cable' that plugs into the drive and the PCI-Express card, next to the SATA II data cable. The disk units must be set up here, and you are able to select between Raid levels 0, 5 and 10, and straight drive use without Raid management.
You'll have to choose how you want to use this Raid unit - using all the disks as high-speed striped storage, using them as secure mirrored storage, or keeping one of the set as a 'spare' to swap over if there's a failure in any of the other units. When the drives were striped together as a Raid 0 unit, designed for speed rather than safety, the performance was impressive, although not outstanding. Burst reads and writes produced scores peaking past 110MB a second. Large file movements weren't so fast of course, but in straight Finder copies they ran at up to 90MB a second, which was more than twice the sustained speed of the Mac Pro's internal SATA drive. It's not the fastest drive, but for reliability and drive unit management it shines.
It is likely that many users will prefer to set this up in a more safety-oriented configuration, at least using one of the units as a 'hot spare', ready to step in if a unit develops problems. In fact, this happened to us during testing; one drive was flagged up as having an imminent problem, and the hot spare feature worked admirably.
As a way of keeping your data secure through drive redundancy and at your fingertips through a high-speed connection, the 3Ware Sidecar with its high-speed Raid controller hardware is a worthy option to consider. It wasn't the fastest Raid storage solution we've seen, but it handled well even during a drive unit problem. Which, after all, is one of the big reasons for having a Raid unit in the first place. You're paying for this, of course, but the big question to consider is how much the safety of your data is worth.
Author: Keith Martin
3Ware Sidecar