After seeing your Speed Test I decided to test my Pegasus R6 connected via TB2 to my 27" mid-2011 iMac.
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External RAID with TB3?
- Thread starter BeechFlyer
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Yes, it's the SSD that is the hold up.
Yeah, seems that only the 512GB SSD is constrained currently. The 1TB & 2TB options have much quicker turnaround times however I just don't see the need to spend the amount Apple wants for that large of an internal SSD. Now that I'm moving the majority of my storage off to the Drobo I won't have the need for much on the iMac itself.
I am revisiting RAID-5 options as well since I got the new iMac. It seems Thunderbolt 3 is still not yet being too widely picked up by enclosure makers. The Akitio Thunder 3 Quad would have been a really affordable barebone 4 bay enclosure but they unfortunately released it too soon, the chipset has problems working with TB3 Macs. Since the 2.5" Quad Mini is already out, does it mean the 3.5" update is coming soon?
Drobo 5D3, or the LaCie arrays are both much more reliable solutions but they are also quite costly. This is a pretty uneasy time to decide whether to wait for other TB3 choices to come (which can drag for very long), or invest heavily on premium choices, or fall back to TB2 / NAS solutions. The main issue with TB2 is the price and future-proofing - looking at the dual drive enclosures out there, the batch of new TB3 ones are costing similarly if not the same as the TB2 options. It feels like a probably unwise investment any further on TB2 devices, unless you already have many TB2 Macs around to take advantage of it natively.
Drobo 5D3, or the LaCie arrays are both much more reliable solutions but they are also quite costly. This is a pretty uneasy time to decide whether to wait for other TB3 choices to come (which can drag for very long), or invest heavily on premium choices, or fall back to TB2 / NAS solutions. The main issue with TB2 is the price and future-proofing - looking at the dual drive enclosures out there, the batch of new TB3 ones are costing similarly if not the same as the TB2 options. It feels like a probably unwise investment any further on TB2 devices, unless you already have many TB2 Macs around to take advantage of it natively.
Particularly with the dual drive devices, it makes sense to purchase TB3 versions and use an adapter given the lack significant price differences between TB2 & TB3 devices. G-Tech just released their TB3 dual drives and LaCie will be releasing their's soon.
Another point to consider is the iMac only having 2 TB3 ports, if a TB2 RAID enclosure is occupying an early chain, it would trim down the potential bandwidth of this one port. The dual drives in particular are not that demanding if it is an HDD array not SSD also. More and more I am inclining towards the Drobo 5D3 but it is quite a heavy investment upfront. By the way some people reported using Akitio Thunder3 Quad on Macs is possible via TB3 Enabler, not sure if it is stable or shaky, does anyone think it is worth risking data / workflow on?
It looks to me that none of the TB3 enclosures can reach the max TB3 throughput even if multiple SSDs are used as RAID0.
Just a crazy idea: If all I want is extreme read/write speed and capacity, is it possible to get two 4-bay enclosures (such as two Akitio Quad), put 8 1GB SSDs in them, and make all 8 SSDs into one RAID0? Is it going to be stable enough if 8 of the disks belong to two different enclosures? Will it be significantly faster than a single enclosure, or the speed will still be capped somewhere?
Just a crazy idea: If all I want is extreme read/write speed and capacity, is it possible to get two 4-bay enclosures (such as two Akitio Quad), put 8 1GB SSDs in them, and make all 8 SSDs into one RAID0? Is it going to be stable enough if 8 of the disks belong to two different enclosures? Will it be significantly faster than a single enclosure, or the speed will still be capped somewhere?
I don't know about 8 1 TB SSDs in two 4-bay enclosures but you can for sure do 4 SSDs in a single enclosure and then daisy chain them. https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/TB4MSRSSD04T/?utm_source=Criteo&utm_medium=shoppingengine&utm_campaign=Criteo
The bottle neck seems to lie in the controllers and pipes in and out of them, in practice you may get higher combined bandwidth if you spread out the enclosures to as many directly attached TB3 ports as possible to minimize overhead. But in a realsitic scenario there is a diminishing return after a certain speed is attained, after that stability is more important for real work I suppose.
You can in theory create a software RAID array with any combination of logical volumes as long as the physical volume is recognizable by OS X. People used to do that a lot with daisy chained Firewire enclosures.
You can do that. I doubt you will see the full benefit, but should get somewhere between 2500 MB/s and 3000 MB/s I would guess. I really doubt it would be worth it though...
That is around double what my Drobo 5D (TB2) gets with 5x4TB drives (configured with dual-drive redundancy), so pretty impressive.
And I agree with those who say purchasing a TB3 model is better than a TB2 with pricing so similar.