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Mac Pro, what's your storage arrangement

My Storage Arrangement

Hello everyone,

Let's see.. nothing too major.. But here goes:

Bay 1: 1TB SATA drive stripped in an array with the 1TB SATA in Bay 2
Bay 3: Time Machine drive of 2TB
Bay 4: Older Mac OS X installs

So, summary is:

Bay 1: 1TB drive - RAID 0 of bays 1 and 2 - Snow Leopard 10.6.8 - Primary
Bay 2: 1TB drive - Combined 1 and 2 for 2TB of storage
Bay 3: 2TB Time Machine Drive
Bay 4: Backup of Snow Leopard, Partition with Mountain Lion
 
Project Versatility

wonderspark said:
Mac Pro 4,1

(1) Samsung 830 256GB SSD in lower ODD bay as boot disk (Crucial M4 as backup clone)
LG 10x BD-R in upper ODD bay

Areca 1880ix-12 RAID card, stock 1GB DDR2
Sans Digital TR8X 8-bay box with two mini-SAS ports
(8) WD2003FYYS 2TB RE-4 HDDs in RAID 6

(1) 4TB Hitachi 5K4000 HDD
(3) 1TB Hitachi/Apple HDDs in RAID 0

Voyager Q dock for about fifteen other SSDs and HDDs used as backups
Caldigit FASTA-6GU3 PCI card for eSATA and USB 3.0 ports
Click to expand...

Sweet dood...

I am debating on my next Enclosure, I have this OWC 4x2TB running in RAID 5 but Thunderbolt is the direction I am thinking. I can't really bring myself to just have a box tho that only has TB like most 4-6 bay ones have. I want USB3 or something...as a backup option...i.e. Project Versatility

----------
slughead said:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1303010/

Now serving 10 external drives:)
Click to expand...

You got me beat I am at 9 unless you count USB Flash Drives over >31 GB :p:eek:


screenshot20130315at250.png


screenshot20130315at251.png
 
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Internal:
96GB SSD - OS, Apps and Home (Lower optical bay)
640GB HDD - Files that I'm sorting through (old backups)
1TB HDD - iTunes
1TB HDD - Documents and various other files including virtual machines
1TB HDD - Cloned external drive

External:
1.5TB HDD - Time Machine

So yeah nothing too exciting here, though I'm in the process of sorting out all my files. After that I'll probably repurpose the drives. Hopefully stick two of the
1TB drives into a RAID1 for Time Machine, then use the remaining 1TB for all my documents and other data, except for iTunes which I will put on the 640GB drive. Keeping the SSD as it is.
 
nothing special:
Slot1: 640GB for my iTunes, iPhoto libraries, download folder and other personal data
Slot2+Slot3: 500GB Seagate's in RAID0 that act as my scratchdisk/work disk
Slot4: 2TB for CCC backups
Optibay: 120GB SSD for OS X and Apps
External 500GB drive that serves as archive for my video files (it gets cloned to internal 2TB as well) + Time Capsule that backups only my SSD and some files from Slot 1 HDD

Plus I have two 2.5" 1TB externals that are clones of the internal 2TB drive (most of the RAID0 is not backed up here because those are temporary files anyway). These two drives get swapped every month between locations.

Yeah, I'm really into backups.
 
I noticed that many use each bay for a single drive. A few had setup bays 1 and 2 in a raid.

I am planning on this, what caveats do I need to look out for?

Bay 1 - OWC Electra 3G 240GB SSD
Bay 2 - OWC Electra 3G 240GB SSD
--> Bays 1 and 2 to be Raid-0 for OS and Apps

Bay 3 - OWC Electra 3G 240GB SSD
Bay 4 - OWC Electra 3G 240GB SSD
--> Bays 3 and 4 to be Raid-0 for VM's and Cloud Files (DropBox,Box,SkyDrive,GoogleDrive)

Caldigit USB3 Card
--> Drobo 5D with 5x2Tb WD Red in Dual Disk Redundancy Mode - Yields 5.44TB of useable space to be used to testing VM's and iTunes Media (I could go with a single drive failure and yield a 7.26TB of useable space)

As for the Raid-0, will I run into any problems with installing OS-X ML 10.8.4 and still have Back to Mac, FMM, VNC, etc?

And do I use Disk Utility to setup the Raid?

Once I get the OS installed, I would do a network restore from a backup of the stock 5,1 drive with all my apps and preferences configured.

TIA!
 
160 GB Intel SSD Boot disk
1.5 TB internal win 7 disk
3 x TB JBOD internal partial backup
Optiarc Blueray RW internal
1 TB external Time machine of boot disk
1.5 TB external Clone of boot disk
8 x 4TB Raid 6 24TB external, main data storage (Areca 1882 controller with Areca 4036 storage unit)
8 x 3TB Qnap Raid 5, NAS backup
4 x 160 GB intel SSD Raid 0, Photo work disk

Esata Sonnet E4P card +
5 x 4TB external JBOD backup (esata Promise box) alternating off site
5 x 4TB external JBOD backup (esata Sonnet box) alternating off site
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1303010/
with 20 disks (4 esata multiport controllers) 2 x 10 disk JBOD extra backup (mix of 2 and 3TB old disks).

+ some extra disks I have not manage to get use of so far.

Kind of paranoid about backups, but have not lost anything since a hard lesson more than 20 years ago. A large part of the data I do have a hard copy of in the basement, as well (3000+ music cd´s and Movie DVD´s).
 
Last edited:
Just bought a used 2010 hex core Mac Pro here is the setup:

One 256GB Samsung SSD
Two 2TB Western Digital Black in Raid 1

One external 2TB MyBook Raid 1 for TM

One Synology NAS DS413 with two 3TB Western Digital Red for Backup. I use rsync for backup over WIFI. I plan to add two 4TB when prices are better.

In addition I will start sending files to Amazon Glacier.
 
240 gb kingston hyperx ssd for OSX, 256 crucial m4 ssd for bootcamp win7(both are connected to apricorn velocity solo x2), 1 tb hdd 7200 rpm for osx programs etc, 2*2 tb firewire 800 external hdd for movies,pictures,movies and timemachine copies. I also have one 1 tb usb external hdd for all kind of stuff. With my mbp retina i have one external 1 tb thunderbolt hd.
 
Three 2TB drives ... 2 of them together in striped raid for faster speed, the 3rd as time machine back up
 
Very basic set up for me:

Bay 1: 1.5TB OS, Apps and docs
Bay 2: 2TB Media
Bay 3: 2TB Media
Bay 4: 3TB Time Machine
 
  • 256GB SSD - Boot/Apps
  • 256GB SSD - Win7/Games
  • 10TB RAID6 i5-2770k 16GB Ubuntu Server 12.04 Linux box running as my NAS (AFP/SMB) for my data. It also runs as my Plex server, Transmission client and a minecraft server.
 
Odb1. blu ray burner
Odb2. sata to molex for a orico 4prt usb 3.0
Bay1. 256gb 840 pro in raid0 1 of 2 For 10.8.4 *
Bay2. 256gb 840 pro in raid0 2 of 2 *
Bay3. 4tb seagate drive for media
Bay4. 1tb for bootcamp strictly for gaming

* 840 pros are temporarily in my mac pro for real world testing until my gaming rig is built and ill put my old 830 256 back as solo boot drive maybe in a tempo if i buy another one. i had the 2x256 pros in a tempo before but i put that in my brothers pro for his photography bussines
 
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OS6-OSX said:
And I heard the disks come in different colors! :cool:
Click to expand...

Believe it or not, but OS 10.8.4 will read a floppy. I needed to pull of some data from an old G3 PowerBook and I had an old external USB floppy drive (Power Mac G3 Blue in color) I used years ago. I scrounged around and found an old floppy, actually a MacInTax Install disc. (I had thrown my all floppies away years ago). But anyway it worked quite nicely. Transferred the data to the floppy on the PowerBook, plugged in the floppy drive to 5,1 Mac Pro pushed in the floppy and voila!

My storage:

Internal:
Solo X2 with a 500GB Samsung 840 500GB SSD
Drive Tray 1 - (1) WD Black 1TB
Drive Tray 2 & 3 - (2) Seagate Barracuda 500 GB
Drive Tray 4 - (1) WD 320 GB (the OEM Drive from my old 3,1 Mac Pro)

OD Tray 1 - LG DVD Burner
OD Tray 2 - LG DVD Burner

External
(1) Micronet Fantom 1TB Firewire
(1) Seagate 500GB Seagate USB

Lou
 
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Internal:
Bay 1 = 256GB SSD Samsung (Fusion Drive with Bay 2)
Bay 2 = 3TB HDD Seagate (Fusion Drive with Bay 1)
Bay 3 = 300GB HDD WD Raptor (Virtual Machines)
ODD 1 = Samsung Blu-ray Writer
ODD 2 = Samsung Blu-ray Reader


External:
NAS 1 = 20TB RAIDZ2
NAS 2 = 15TB RAIDZ2
 
Bay 1: 480gb SanDisk Extreme SSD (OSX Boot/Applications)
Bay 2: 480gb SanDisk Extreme SSD (Win8 Boot/Applications)
Bay 3: 2tb Hitachi - HFS+ Data
Bay 4: 3tb Hitachi - Time Machine backup for Bay 1 & 3

Looking to put the 2 ssd's on a PCI-e Sata III card I have coming.
 
ODD = 250G Samsung 840 (OSX Boot / Apps)
BAY1 = 1TB WD Caviar Black (Win7 Bootcamp)
BAY2 = 1TB WD Caviar Black (OSX 10.8.5 / OSX 10.9 Mavericks / Linux )
BAY3 = 1TB WD Caviar Black (General Data/Archives)
BAY4 = 1TB WD Caviar Black (X-Plane 9 / X-Plane 10 / X-Plane Development, Orthophotos, 3D Objects, Code)
FW800 = 1TB Segate Barracuda External (Time Machine)
 
Optical Bay 2 via highpoint 640L - 250GB Samsung 840 Evo - OS + Apps

Bay 1 & 2 - 2x Seagate 3TB in Raid 1 Mirror - Projects + Archives
Bay 3 - 500GB Bootcamp
Bay 4 - 640GB iTunes + Media

External ESata 2TB Raid 0 - Time Machine
External ESata 500GB - App Installers

Projects + Archives- synced with Crashplan
 
1.1TB Fusion Drive - OS X Apps & Data
320 GB HDD - Original OS X Drive, Used for Boot Camp
160 GB HDD - Came with my tower when I purchased, used for Video Storage
2TB G-DRIVE via FireWire 800 - External Storage & Time Machine Backups
 
My nMP storage arrangement...

When I order the nMP, I'm going to opt for the 1TB SSD option which will serve as my boot drive with apps and some working documents.

Everything else is being offloaded to a Drobo 5D with 12TB of drives. With just over 8TB available for data, I'll split that into a 2TB volume for Time Machine backups and a 6TB volume for media. Of course the Drobo will be attached via Thunderbolt and has a 90GB mSATA thrown in to speed up working with Photoshop and Aperture.
 
Long-time Mac user. Never lost a file yet - always saved by back-ups when a drive went bad.

Bay 1: SSD 500 GB / Mac OS, apps, mail, scratch space, 100GB Boot Camp partition
Bay 2: 1.5 TB / file storage: photos, videos, sounds
Bay 3: 1.5 TB / Time Machine - currently holds ~ 6 months of recoverable files
Bay 4: 4TB / overflow, not required to be backed up

Outboard: Two 2 TB USB drives, used with Carbon Copy Cloner to back up Bay 1 and Bay 2; swapped weekly. Alternate drive stored in fireproof box in basement
 
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