Best drives for thunderbolt RAID array connected to Mac Pro

[cbt3]

I have an OWC thunderbay 4, and am looking to get some good drives with it to run a 4 drive RAID 5 array, hooked up to my Mac Pro (Late 2013). I was looking at 4x 4TB WD Red Drives, or Seagate's Equivalent NAS HDD; they are designed for RAID, but then I saw teh RPM was listed at 5400RPM? Isn't that notebook HDD speed? Am I better off getting WD Black drives? or better yet WD RE/SE enterprise drives? I am a video editor and looking to work with large files in FCP/Premiere/After Effects. I want the fastest data rate possible with redundancy so I don't lose any files if a drive crashes.

Any thoughts on this appreciated.

 

[satinsilverem2]

If you are looking for all out speed and have the money use solid state drives. Ive been using the two of the 4TB WD Red drives for about 6 months now and they are plenty fast in RAID 0 averaging around 320 MB/s. The WD Black drives would be noisier and run hotter and in my experience they aren't all that much faster. If you are set on a 7200RPM drive then I would look at the 4TB HGST Deskstar drive. They are very fast and have bulletproof reliability.

 

[monokakata]

I have an OWC thunderbay 4, and am looking to get some good drives with it to run a 4 drive RAID 5 array, hooked up to my Mac Pro (Late 2013). I was looking at 4x 4TB WD Red Drives, or Seagate's Equivalent NAS HDD; they are designed for RAID, but then I saw teh RPM was listed at 5400RPM? Isn't that notebook HDD speed? Am I better off getting WD Black drives? or better yet WD RE/SE enterprise drives? I am a video editor and looking to work with large files in FCP/Premiere/After Effects. I want the fastest data rate possible with redundancy so I don't lose any files if a drive crashes.

Any thoughts on this appreciated.

It's not rare to see 5400 rpm drives meant for NAS units, because the link speeds (ethernet) and the way most people use a NAS don't require fast drives. For your OWC unit that's not the case.

I have the same unit, and I'm using 2 Hitachi 4 TB 7200 rpm drives in it (as working drives), a 4 TB Seagate 5400 (or is it 5900?) drive for Time Machine, and a 1 TB SSD. It's proven to be a good combination. The Hitachis are not in any RAID configuration.

 

[cbt3]

If you are looking for all out speed and have the money use solid state drives. Ive been using the two of the 4TB WD Red drives for about 6 months now and they are plenty fast in RAID 0 averaging around 320 MB/s. The WD Black drives would be noisier and run hotter and in my experience they aren't all that much faster. If you are set on a 7200RPM drive then I would look at the 4TB HGST Deskstar drive. They are very fast and have bulletproof reliability.

Unfortunately I need speed and storage since HD video accumulates in size very quickly. I would not be able to cost effictly run a 12TB of storage on SSDs.
Ideally I would want to array running at at least 500 mb/s r/w. If I can do that with the Red drives that is probably fine if they are better suited for RAID; although looking at those 4TB HGST Deskstar drives now, I might be willing to pay a little more to get a little extra speed boost if they are also RAID peak performance.

 

[Zipski]

i have stardom 4bay thunderbolt 4x4gb seagate enterprise raid 0 it runs over 550+mb/s
4k raw from bmcc in da vinci runs ok

 

[cbt3]

i have stardom 4bay thunderbolt 4x4gb seagate enterprise raid 0 it runs over 550+mb/s
4k raw from bmcc in da vinci runs ok

I am a little leery about running a 4 drive RAID0, I would really want to run a RAID5 for the data redundancy.

 

[AidenShaw]

i have stardom 4bay thunderbolt 4x4gb seagate enterprise raid 0 it runs over 550+mb/s
4k raw from bmcc in da vinci runs ok

Which drive model? Seagate has many different enterprise disks.