Need help removing my NVMe cards from my cMP and making them external drives

[bigbadneil]

Guys
I have a 2012 MacPro that I upgraded with 4 x 2TB 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 drives about two years ago. The drives are housed in a HighPoint SSD7101A-1 M.2 NVMe RAID Controller.
I am going to buy a new Mac Studio and would like to use the above NVMe drives with my new Mac Studio. I was thinking about buying an external housings for these drives so that they can be used as External hard drives, the problem I have is that 3 of the drives are linked together inside the HighPoint internal housing to make 1 x 6TB drive and this drive holds 90% of my photographs.
What will be the best way to manage these NVMe drives so that I don't loose these photographs ?

Thanks in advance

Neil

 

[velocityg4]

Restore them from a backup. You have a backup right? Just using one drive without a backup is a really bad idea, RAID 0 is even worse. Even RAID 1 isn’t that great. Your still vulnerable to fire, theft, power surges and so forth.

At any rate OWC has the OWC Express 4M2. Which you can put all the drives in. I’d expect you could also use a Thunderbolt PCIe adapter to house your current card and RAID setup.

 

[Chancha]

Doesn’t Highpoint itself also make TB3 enclosures (or maybe they don’t sell bare cases)?

The advise from the above poster is important, regardless of your current RAID config, you ought to have a full backup of all data inside, which then when you migrate to whatever new storage solution you have the option of restoring from that backup, instead of hoping the 4 NVMe SSDs will continue working striped without problems.

Since you don’t already have the Studio yet, if I were you I would wait til WWDC to see if the Mac Pro gets any news. Internal PCIe cards is a really legit reason to not go the Mac Studio route; Thunderbolt connections are great when they work but not when they don’t.

 

[mcnallym]

Doesn’t Highpoint itself also make TB3 enclosures (or maybe they don’t sell bare cases)?

The advise from the above poster is important, regardless of your current RAID config, you ought to have a full backup of all data inside, which then when you migrate to whatever new storage solution you have the option of restoring from that backup, instead of hoping the 4 NVMe SSDs will continue working striped without problems.

Since you don’t already have the Studio yet, if I were you I would wait til WWDC to see if the Mac Pro gets any news. Internal PCIe cards is a really legit reason to not go the Mac Studio route; Thunderbolt connections are great when they work but not when they don’t.

RS6661A Overview | HighPoint Technologies, Inc.

The RocketStor 6661A Thunderbolt™ 3 to PCIe 3.0 x16 expansion chassis can connect Ethernet, external storage/RAID controller, and more.

www.highpoint-tech.com

Is what you would be looking for.

Is the PCI-E barebones expansion chassis.

RS6661A-NVMe-Overview

268d36ea-e079-44cd-b355-b7e1a503377b

www.highpoint-tech.com

Is the same chassis but prefitted with the highpoint 7101a card coincidentally the same card OP has.

So in THEORY should be able to pull from Mac Pro and slot into the storage enclosure and attach to the Mac Studio.

However I would ensure that have a full backup taken of the drives first. Should of course be taking backups already so may have the required back in place. As other people say RAID is not a backup solution.

 

[Pressure]

Yikes, that's a disaster waiting to happen with that many points of failure. RAID-0 used for critical data?

If the pictures are important you should definitely invest in an off-site safe storage solution and a more robust on-site storage solution. Something like a local ZFS array and Backblaze Cloud Backup ($7/month) would do the trick.

 

[handheldgames]

Guys
I have a 2012 MacPro that I upgraded with 4 x 2TB 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 drives about two years ago. The drives are housed in a HighPoint SSD7101A-1 M.2 NVMe RAID Controller.
I am going to buy a new Mac Studio and would like to use the above NVMe drives with my new Mac Studio. I was thinking about buying an external housings for these drives so that they can be used as External hard drives, the problem I have is that 3 of the drives are linked together inside the HighPoint internal housing to make 1 x 6TB drive and this drive holds 90% of my photographs.
What will be the best way to manage these NVMe drives so that I don't loose these photographs ?

Thanks in advance

Neil

Great to hear the HighPoint SSD7101A worked out for you as well. I'm in the exact same situation except that I've already made the jump to the mac studio. While the Highpoint 6661A is an option, it's likely to make more noise than the projector in my studio.

Presently, I have a legacy Akitio Thunderbolt 2 single slot expansion chassis in setup for a BlackMagic Decklink 4K capture card and even though I have it stashed behind my monitor, it makes more noise than the Benq Ht2150ST projector mounted on the ceiling about 10' away.

External expansion for the studio is great, BUT sound management from all the fans quickly becomes an issue that wasn't present with a properly cooled and ventilated tower.