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nMP external storage set up...

violst

violst

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 14, 2012
339
161
With the advent of the nMP soon to be released, I was wondering what people were thinking about when it comes to their external storage and back up set up?

The thoughts I have for my set up so far are the Lacie 2Big 6TB thunderbolt raid with a 6TB usb3.0 time machine back up, or possibly a NAS raid as my backup so it can serve a dual function as a back up and I will be able to access the backed up files while I'm on the road.

I haven't thought to long and hard about it but I thought I would put it out there to see what other people might be doing with their possible set up.
 
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With the inclusion of TB2 ports, I'd say go with that, and avoid a NAS as throughput is much slower.
 
I'm in the same boat. This last weekend I took the plunge and got a Drobo 5D. FWIW, I got my local Frys which usually sells the 5D for $849 to match Amazon's price of $599 which was below their cost. They weren't exactly thrilled ;) While I was there, I picked up a 90GB mSATA to make use of it's data-aware tiering capability.

I currently have 8.5TB in the 5 bays. Once I get the nMP, I'll partition the Drobo so that I can use it for time machine backups as well as my file server.
 
Yes for my main working drive it will be TB2 but for the time machine back up I don't see the value in buying another thunderbold drive, Since usb3 is cheaper but still very fast it should work well as a backup.

Or another option is to get a larger raid case and just go with raid 5 for redundancy.
 
If I get a nMP, I only have have a single 3TB drive in my 2009 for my Aperture archives that will need a new home. My media library is already attached to my headless HTPC Mac Mini that also serves as a NAS, my Time Machine backups go to the Time Capsule, and offsite backups are already USB 3 externals.

I may just connect that 3TB Aperture Archive drive to the Mini NAS or get a nice new 4TB Lacie Porsche external USB3 drive to connect to the nMP.
 
violst said:
Thats why I'm asking. What would you suggest? What is your current set up?
Click to expand...

Sounds like you might be better served just have archival drives for most of the 6TB backup, rather than using time machine. Just divide your thunderbolt 6TB RAID into two directories, one to be backed up by Time Machine and one not, then put things you don't modify often in the one not backed up to time machine, but keep a copy of them on a disk somewhere else.
 
Well, I'd have implemented solution in the below link, but HP has a firmware/fan/noise

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1596559/

issue that I hope they fix.

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/ProLia...MicroServer-Gen8-is-noisy/td-p/6171563/page/2

Some additional ram, some disks, and FreeNas, it is better than many solutions. With a managed ethernet switch, multiple 1 gb/s ethernet streams can be used to support many computers.

For speed, get 1 TB of pci disk and get good io speeds. For secure storage with lots of TB for backup/archiving, see links.
 
I just bought a LaCie TB 4GB 2big (home folder, etc) and a LaCie TB 4GB d2 (TM backup) that I'm using with my 2011 iMac until the nMP comes out. They're working great now and I plan to simply move them over to the nMP when I get my hands on one.
 
MattDSLR said:
i'm lost with that one
I hope sales on new mac pro will show apple that they will need new drives
Click to expand...

You don't know much about Apple, do you?

Poor sales of the TrashCan will tell Apple "that nobody wants a headless system", and they'll simple kill the TrashCan rather than address its problems.

And killing the Mac Pro was probably a driving force behind the design of the TrashCan. "Let's replace a low volume system with one horribly constrained so that even fewer people want it - then we can kill it."
 
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I've got a similar problem, a old Mac Pro with lots of HD's.
Internal
.5 TB SSD < 1 year old
2 TB HD < 2 years old
3 TB HD < 1 year old
3 TB HD < 3 years old
External
3 TB HD < 2 years old
3 TB HD < 1 year old (TimeMachine)
4 TB HD (actually 2X2 TB) < 3 years old

At present I'm leaning towards buying two Drobo 5D's.
One would be my primary storage and would have 4 new 4 TB HD's, and one of my existing 3 TB HDs configured for dual disk redundancy giving me almost 10 TB of usable storage.
The other would have the three remaining 3 TB HD's also configured for dual disk redundancy giving me 2.72 TB of usable storage. It would be my new TimeMachine storage.

When the time comes, I can buy another 4TB for the primary drobo and move the 3TB to the Time Machine. This would grow the primary to 10.89 TB and the Time Machine to 5.44 TB. That should be good for a few years.

This would protect my primary data against two disk failures and allow me to put more data under TImeMachine protection while going from a single 3TB HD to an array with two disk protection.

I estimate my costs would be $1400 for the two drobos, and $900-1200 for the four 4 TB drives.

I'm still considering things and reading threads here. I'll probably start buying hardware in early Dec.
 
AidenShaw said:
You don't know much about Apple, do you?

Poor sales of the TrashCan will tell Apple "that nobody wants a headless system", and they'll simple kill the TrashCan rather than address its problems.

And killing the Mac Pro was probably a driving force behind the design of the TrashCan. "Let's replace a low volume system with one horribly constrained so that even fewer people want it - then we can kill it."
Click to expand...

I think you are correct
There comes Cube issues again
 
AidenShaw said:
You don't know much about Apple, do you?

Poor sales of the TrashCan will tell Apple "that nobody wants a headless system", and they'll simple kill the TrashCan rather than address its problems.

And killing the Mac Pro was probably a driving force behind the design of the TrashCan. "Let's replace a low volume system with one horribly constrained so that even fewer people want it - then we can kill it."
Click to expand...

For everyone on this forum who can't stand the new Mac Pro there seems to be a new person who's come along and wants one for surfing the web and doing email because it looks like something Jony Ive designed. I'm sure it's going to do just fine... It may even set new sales records for the Mac Pro line (although we'll likely never know).
 
VirtualRain said:
For everyone on this forum who can't stand the new Mac Pro there seems to be a new person who's come along and wants one for surfing the web and doing email because it looks like something Jony Ive designed. I'm sure it's going to do just fine... It may even set new sales records for the Mac Pro line (although we'll likely never know).
Click to expand...

Great…let's bring the rest of the remaining professional Mac products over into the consumer section...
 
For my work flow the new Mac Pro will be great for my needs, I have no problems with it. The only difference for me will be that my main working storage will be external instead of internal. The more I start to wrap my head around the nMP and figure out what my set up will be the more at ease I am with it.

The thing that I really like is all of my HDD/SDD's will be blazing fast as opposed to my current set up. and I won't be stuck with these under powered GPU's anymore.

I do understand that other people have more elaborate storage and PCI set up's and I'm hoping once people start getting used to the new working parameters of the nMP and adapting it to their needs they will quickly forget about all the things we thought might be a problem and get into a grove with once again doing great work with it.
 
violst said:
Thats why I'm asking. What would you suggest? What is your current set up?
Click to expand...

I don't want to hijack the thread to bash Time Machine, but I've come to the conclusion that this is a relatively poor investment in space ... IF you have a good image copy strategy. The one time I really needed to use Time Machine it didn't allow me to replace a defective program from Apple. Great.

I have an internal HDD that is an image copy of my boot SSD (this is the original disk that shipped with the MP and has the recovery partition). I update the image when anything "significant" happens. I have a separate internal SSD for user data, that has it's own HDD image copy. Once again, I update it as needed.

I make external backups of all disks that are moved off site in a rotating manner each week.

Finally, I use inexpensive media - multiple flash drives and multiple copies - to keep a copy of all user data. The OS and programs can always be recovered. It's the user data that is most important.

The backup process takes about 15 minutes a week - cheap insurance.
 
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violst said:
Thats why I'm asking. What would you suggest? What is your current set up?
Click to expand...

In addition to separate SSDs for boot and user data, I have a separate HDD for media (iTunes + photos) and another HDD for virtual machines (Win 7, Win 8.1 and Linux).

I'm on the fence about the nMP. I bought a 2102 hex-core to replace an aging 3,1 several months back. I suppose I'll wait for the technology and pricing to shake out before I make any decisions. But reliable, affordable JBOD enclosures are a big part of my decision.
 
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tamvly said:
I don't want to hijack the thread to bash Time Machine, but I've come to the conclusion that this is a relatively poor investment in space ... IF you have a good image copy strategy. The one time I really needed to use Time Machine it didn't allow me to replace a defective program from Apple. Great.
Click to expand...

I think your input is great thanks. thats why I started this thread to see what people are doing with their storage and backups.

Is there a rule of thumb with time-machine. Should your time-machine match your storage capacity. Thats what I thought as a matter of fact I was told your time machine should be a little bigger then your primary storage capacity?
 
violst said:
I think your input is great thanks. thats why I started this thread to see what people are doing with their storage and backups.

Is there a rule of thumb with time-machine. Should your time-machine match your storage capacity. Thats what I thought as a matter of fact I was told your time machine should be a little bigger then your primary storage capacity?
Click to expand...

For TM to be effective it should be at least 50% bigger than the backup source.

The main problem with TM is the fact that backups can become corrupt more often than I feel comfortable with. Using the built-in clone capability in OS X or an app like Carbon Copy cloner in addition to a TM backup, or instead of it, is a good idea.
 
AidenShaw said:
You don't know much about Apple, do you?

Poor sales of the TrashCan will tell Apple "that nobody wants a headless system", and they'll simple kill the TrashCan rather than address its problems.

And killing the Mac Pro was probably a driving force behind the design of the TrashCan. "Let's replace a low volume system with one horribly constrained so that even fewer people want it - then we can kill it."
Click to expand...

You don't know much about money, do you? Why not just kill something instead of spending millions into R&D'ing a new device, bringing manufacturing to USA and hiring thousands of people for the job, for then to kill it? The nMP would have sold less than the old one even if there was no redesign simply because less and less people need these devices every year. Eventually there will always be a demographic that's always going to buy these machines, but we aren't there yet. So MP sales will keep bleeding for a while.

What I think is Apple will have higher margins on the new design, so they can keep it longer compared to a "just a refresh" path, and also they will drive the TB peripheral market, which helps all their macs, not just MP.

----------
VirtualRain said:
For everyone on this forum who can't stand the new Mac Pro there seems to be a new person who's come along and wants one for surfing the web and doing email because it looks like something Jony Ive designed. I'm sure it's going to do just fine... It may even set new sales records for the Mac Pro line (although we'll likely never know).
Click to expand...

I highly doubt they will sell any of these to people who browse the web. So I think you are wrong there. They are actually losing some minority MP users with this release, gamers among them. Even though Mac gaming sucks, there still are people who buy a lower end Mac Pro's to install a flashed high end GPU in it and play games. Those people will switch to Hackintoshes for good now, so that's a lost group. And anyone who needs a specialty PCI-e hardware which doesn't exist as a TB solution yet will not buy the nMP at least until his problem is fixed.

They will probably gain some new users due to the small size and low noise though. Anyone who is running a mastering studio will definitely want to check one of these out.
 
iBug2 said:
I highly doubt they will sell any of these to people who browse the web. So I think you are wrong there.
Click to expand...

I'm actually sorry to say that I'm not wrong...
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1668307/

Even though Mac gaming sucks, there still are people who buy a lower end Mac Pro's to install a flashed high end GPU in it and play games. Those people will switch to Hackintoshes for good now, so that's a lost group.
Click to expand...

Nope...
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1667072/

And I'm sure we haven't seen the last of this. :eek:
 
Just throwing in my experience, I use Time Machine only on a subset of my data. It's nice for ~/Documents/ and Mail folders and the more transient and non-project data that we all have. My drives where I stage my FCP work, or large databases, or my archives of past projects are excluded from my Time Machine backups and mean that I don't need ridiculous size for the Time Machine volume. Roughly analogous to running Time Machine on the internal SSD of the nMP I plan to buy, but not on the external storage that hosts actual project work files.

I have a pair of USB drives that I alternate for Time Machine, keeping one at home and one at the office, protecting me against the building burning down or theft or some sort of catastrophic event which could lead to the loss of both the data drive and the backup drive.

I also run Backblaze for off-site backups of everything on the system, which gives me a contingency for recovery although not quick since it would involve a long download or a FedEx'd drive to get the data restored.

I plan to get a Drobo alongside the upgrade from my old Mac Pro to the new Mac Pro, but I'm not decided on the specific solution since I'd like to wait to see what TB2 options arrive on the marketplace. The current Drobo 5D is over a year old now and I figure they're likely to refresh the product lineup in the next month or so.
 
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