need advice for a new mass storage solution

[TXnATL]

So far I have been considering a Drobo 5D3 (I know the horror stories some people have had with Drobo's "bricking" , but I haven't had any of those problems and am currently using a 5 year old 5D and I am not getting the speed I'd like even though i have 128gb MSATA in the cache bay and 7200rpm drives.) I like that like the 5D I can set up the 5D3 with dual drive redundancy (Drobo's version of RAID 6) and swap out smaller capacity driives for larger ones as the need arises.

I have also looked at the Areca 8050U3-6 , a 6 bay Thunderbolt 3 box which is a hardware RAID solution. This being a hardware RAID I have been advised that all of the drives have to match. On the plus side ARECA appears to be very heavy enterprise level equipment and is well respected.

At Lloyd Chambers recommendation I am now also looking at the OWC ThunderBay 6, Also a six bay box which uses SoftRaid as a RAID controller and can set it up for RAID 6.
The drives I will be using are 10TB HGST He10.

Question (finally!): Has anyone here used the earlier OWC ThunderBay boxes and what were your experiences?

 

[phrehdd]

There is another option if you are interested - NAS with TB2 or TB3 connection.

Raid 5 takes a little bit of a hit in speed and RAID 6 a bit more. If speed is your thing, you might consider RAID 10 with a stand by drive. If you do work in copies rather than editing over, you can do asynchronous "back up" within the same box (NAS or multi-bay box etc.). In short, you might stripe drives for speed then back it up incrementally to a similar volume. There are a few variations on a theme. As I have no need for speed, RAID 5 or 6 is fine.

I think you might appreciate this video as it may open doors and at least inspire you that there are more than one or two options out there -

 

[TXnATL]

There is another option if you are interested - NAS with TB2 or TB3 connection.

Raid 5 takes a little bit of a hit in speed and RAID 6 a bit more. If speed is your thing, you might consider RAID 10 with a stand by drive. If you do work in copies rather than editing over, you can do asynchronous "back up" within the same box (NAS or multi-bay box etc.). In short, you might stripe drives for speed then back it up incrementally to a similar volume. There are a few variations on a theme. As I have no need for speed, RAID 5 or 6 is fine.

I think you might appreciate this video as it may open doors and at least inspire you that there are more than one or two options out there -

Thanks, I am watching it now but have already made the decision that DAS works better for me than NAS.

 

[phrehdd]

Thanks, I am watching it now but have already made the decision that DAS works better for me than NAS.

These are storage that works as both NAS and DAS.