Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

nMP external storage set up...

AidenShaw said:
What's your guess as to how many days it will take to rebalance after the switch to the larger drive? Will it even work if your free space is less than the size of the drive that you're pulling?
Click to expand...

After about 4 weeks of ownership my Drobo 5D with 4 4TB WD RE drives and one 2TB WD Black. Reached 96% full at 8.66 TB with 381 GB free. I'm running it in dual disk redundancy mode. I saw this coming so I had already ordered a fifth 4TB WD RE drive. I installed that yesterday replacing the 2TB drive. It is almost done rebuilding. It will have taken 21 hours to do the rebuild. I've continued to read and write data to it as it was rebuilding. That wasn't so bad.

My Drobo is now maxed out with 5 4TB drives. With dual disk redundancy it will have 10.81 TB of available space and is currently 81% full. My total cost of the Drobo and 5 drives was about $2100.
 
Rich.Cohen said:
My Drobo is now maxed out with 5 4TB drives. With dual disk redundancy it will have 10.81 TB of available space and is currently 81% full. My total cost of the Drobo and 5 drives was about $2100.
Click to expand...

Just curious why the Drobo? You can store 16Tb of data, on 4 x 4Gb WD Green drives, for about $680 + $220 for a USB 3.0 enclosure.
 
cinealta said:
Just curious why the Drobo? You can store 16Tb of data, on 4 x 4Gb WD Green drives, for about $680 + $220 for a USB 3.0 enclosure.
Click to expand...

I wanted some protection from disk failure. The Drobo seemed like a good choice. With 5 drives in dual mode I'm protected against 2 drive failures. It seemed good to me. I know that the Drobo itself is still a single point of failure, but it doesn't have any moving parts.

Prior to the Drobo, my Mac Pro 1,1 had an SSD and three internal drives with a total of 8 TB of space. Each of the internal drives was mirrored to an external drive overnight. I was running out of space and I plan to buy a new Mac Pro ASAP. I may not have the best solution, but I think I'm a lot better off than I was before. It will probably be a couple of years before I need to worry about expanding beyond the Drobo.

It took 2 weeks to transfer all my data via USB 2.
 
Rich.Cohen said:
I wanted some protection from disk failure. The Drobo seemed like a good choice. With 5 drives in dual mode I'm protected against 2 drive failures. It seemed good to me. I know that the Drobo itself is still a single point of failure, but it doesn't have any moving parts.
Click to expand...

How's your speed on the drobo 5d? I have a couple of the second gen four drive units and find them terribly slow (less than 20MB/s). What kind of speed can you get from the USB 3 enclosure?
 
Rich.Cohen said:
I wanted some protection from disk failure. The Drobo seemed like a good choice. With 5 drives in dual mode I'm protected against 2 drive failures. It seemed good to me. I know that the Drobo itself is still a single point of failure, but it doesn't have any moving parts.

Prior to the Drobo, my Mac Pro 1,1 had an SSD and three internal drives with a total of 8 TB of space. Each of the internal drives was mirrored to an external drive overnight. I was running out of space and I plan to buy a new Mac Pro ASAP. I may not have the best solution, but I think I'm a lot better off than I was before. It will probably be a couple of years before I need to worry about expanding beyond the Drobo.

It took 2 weeks to transfer all my data via USB 2.
Click to expand...

Seems crazy to me... Especially that last part... 2 weeks to transfer data, and a 2 year life expectancy. Do you really need all that data online at all times? A much more pragmatic solution might be JBOD and when a drive is full put it on a shelf. And ideally mirror it and keep its duplicate offsite.

I generate roughly a TB of photos every year... Which gets expensive to maintain and backup. So this is my approach... Last years archives are on a large drive in my NAS and a duplicate/mirror is kept offsite. Years 2-4 are on a large HD that's in my desk drawer with its mirror also stored offsite. In a couple more years, the drive in my NAS will be full, and it will go into the drawer and be replaced by a new drive. On the occasion I need or want to rework a photo from two years ago, I'll slot that old drive in, pull the files, and put it back in the drawer.

I guess it all depends on how frequently you access your archived data from past years vs the inconvenience of swapping a drive in when needed, but it seems like a lot of people here keep an insane amount of data "online" and instantly accessible at all times. It's putting a lot of hours on that media, adding to enclosure costs, and creating maintenance and backup issues that can all be avoided.
 
rtrueman said:
How's your speed on the drobo 5d? I have a couple of the second gen four drive units and find them terribly slow (less than 20MB/s). What kind of speed can you get from the USB 3 enclosure?
Click to expand...

Sorry, I have a Mac Pro 1,1 and I'm using USB 2 until I get a nMP. I not doing anything that demands much speed right now. The speed seem to be acceptable when I play a video.

----------
cinealta said:
Great. Thanks for the advice. It sounds like better protection than mirroring.
Click to expand...

I think its better from a failure/risk perspective. With 5 disks and 2 of them used for parity that means 60% of my storage is usable. With mirroring it would be 50%. The Drobo adds risks of its own based on the customer feedback I saw on Amazon.
 
VirtualRain said:
Seems crazy to me... Especially that last part... 2 weeks to transfer data, and a 2 year life expectancy. Do you really need all that data online at all times? A much more pragmatic solution might be JBOD and when a drive is full put it on a shelf. And ideally mirror it and keep its duplicate offsite.

…

I guess it all depends on how frequently you access your archived data from past years vs the inconvenience of swapping a drive in when needed, but it seems like a lot of people here keep an insane amount of data "online" and instantly accessible at all times. It's putting a lot of hours on that media, adding to enclosure costs, and creating maintenance and backup issues that can all be avoided.
Click to expand...

You're right. I have a different usage pattern than you do, but there are long periods when I do not need a particular set of data. Like a lot of things, my data storage just grew. I started out with a single internal drive and an external Time Machine drive. (I'm not sure if I used time machine on day one.) I gradually added internal drives and external drives to mirror them over time. During that time I never rethought my storage organization or what I needed always available. Only about 300 GB of data is managed by Time Machine. The rest is less important and could be replaced from my clients in the event of a catastrophe.

Over the years, I have suffered through two disk failures without loosing data, so protecting against disk failure is important to me. The Drobo does this, but as you suggest, it may be overkill. I'm committed now to the Drobo, so I probably won't be changing soon, but I will keep your approach in mind. It does have advantages.

I don't accumulate data at the same rate you do. My 2 year estimate was worst case. Transferring data took 2 weeks via USB 2 and was a one-time event in preparation for my nMP. It didn't bother me at all since it was unattended and I could continue normal operation while it was underway.

I'm curious, do you use low cost drives for you backups? Do you know anything about failure modes for disks that remain shut down for long periods of time? At one time, 10-20 years ago, there could be problems if a disk was not turned on at all for years.
 
Rich.Cohen said:
I'm curious, do you use low cost drives for you backups? Do you know anything about failure modes for disks that remain shut down for long periods of time? At one time, 10-20 years ago, there could be problems if a disk was not turned on at all for years.
Click to expand...

To be honest, I have no idea about failure modes... although if hard drives are anything like a car, the chances of it starting up after two years of sitting are extremely unlikely :D Perhaps I'll be shocked one day to find out I can't mount an old drive. :eek:

As for drives, I typically buy WD Green in the sweet-spot size of the day.
 
VirtualRain said:
To be honest, I have no idea about failure modes... although if hard drives are anything like a car, the chances of it starting up after two years of sitting are extremely unlikely :D Perhaps I'll be shocked one day to find out I can't mount an old drive. :eek:

As for drives, I typically buy WD Green in the sweet-spot size of the day.
Click to expand...

Well drives have very little in common with a car, but moving parts that do not move for years without maintenance can develop problems. I seem to recall that a long time ago there was a problem of heads adhering to disks.

Risks are everywhere and its the ones that you're not aware of or choose to ignore that are the most likely to bite you.

I used to do risk management for software projects. On one project I asked the key players to each write down five indicators of trouble within their own areas. Six months later the project was looking shaky, but the managers were all saying AOK. I sat down with one of them and took out his list. Of the five indicators, three of them were red. Does this remind you of the Affordable Health Care System?
 
In related news, this is on the front page today...

The Promise Pegasus2 R4 is now available without disks for $699. This will be the solution for someone wanting to run multiples SSDs in RAID0. You should be able to get close to 2000 MB/s out of this thing if they did it right.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/HE150VC/A/promise-pegasus2-r4-diskless-4bay-raid-system

HE150
 
VirtualRain said:
The Promise Pegasus2 R4 is now available without disks for $699. This will be the solution for someone wanting to run multiples SSDs in RAID0. You should be able to get close to 2000 MB/s out of this thing if they did it right.
Click to expand...
It's pretty big for a four-disk box, especially when it says on the page that still uses an external power supply (in spite of having a kettle plug connector on the back).

I could understand needing to eat up some internal space for an internal PSU, but if the note on the mention isn't a typo then that's a lot of wasted space on the left and top (the top presumably houses the RAID controller and the two Thunderbolt ports, I can't see why you'd need much space for those).

This is the kind of thing that annoys me about the Thunderbolt options; functionally it might be fine, but for the premium price it doesn't seem much like a premium product if corners have been cut. At least the fan looks a decent size.
 
haravikk said:
It's pretty big for a four-disk box, especially when it says on the page that still uses an external power supply (in spite of having a kettle plug connector on the back).

I could understand needing to eat up some internal space for an internal PSU, but if the note on the mention isn't a typo then that's a lot of wasted space on the left and top (the top presumably houses the RAID controller and the two Thunderbolt ports, I can't see why you'd need much space for those).

This is the kind of thing that annoys me about the Thunderbolt options; functionally it might be fine, but for the premium price it doesn't seem much like a premium product if corners have been cut. At least the fan looks a decent size.
Click to expand...

My Pegasus R4 plugs in directly to the wall socket. There is no external power supply.
 
I'm waiting for fabless external storage, or a relatively inexpensive 2.5" SSD enclosure that will take four drives. I know of one for video professionals that is rack mount, I'm looking for a desk unit.
 
Cubemmal said:
I'm waiting for fabless external storage, or a relatively inexpensive 2.5" SSD enclosure that will take four drives. I know of one for video professionals that is rack mount, I'm looking for a desk unit.
Click to expand...

I am in the opposite boat. I have so many different external drives all over the place that I have decided to force myself to stop buying them - it's like a disease I have. Now I want to consolidate and put everything into a rack.
 
AidenShaw said:
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...

Nonsense, on so many levels. If Apple wants to kill something, they just kill it. When they discontinued the Xserve, they didn't come out with some other device as to give some reason to get rid of it. It would be a waste of time and money.
 
theSeb said:
I am in the opposite boat. I have so many different external drives all over the place that I have decided to force myself to stop buying them - it's like a disease I have. Now I want to consolidate and put everything into a rack.
Click to expand...

Yeah I got a Synology five bay with another five bay eSATA boxcar. Dual Gb ethernet and it's off in my lan "closet" (small room off my office) to get rid of the noise. For the nMP I just need one or two SSD's in a TB enclosure.
 
Cubemmal said:
I'm waiting for fabless external storage, or a relatively inexpensive 2.5" SSD enclosure that will take four drives. I know of one for video professionals that is rack mount, I'm looking for a desk unit.
Click to expand...

I got the Blackmagic Multidock yesterday. Perfect for me so far...

Fanless
Bootable
----
But not cheap - and does not come with TB cable or even a power cord :)
 
I just received my WD Velociraptor Thunderbolt Duo... got it from Amazon as a warehouse deal for $400... it makes for a nice super fast 2TB of storage. It will be ideal for hosting my Aperture libraries for the last couple years (the latest library will be on the SSD and older ones go onto the NAS).

Even though it has a fan, I can't hear it (even with it sitting next to my mouse). When it's working hard, I can hear the occasional chatter of those VR heads but it's quieter than I expected.

Now all I need is a nMP to connect it to (I'm testing it on my MBP).
 

Attachments

  • photo.JPG
    photo.JPG
    333.5 KB · Views: 359
  • Screen Shot 2013-12-12 at 9.31.54 AM.png
    Screen Shot 2013-12-12 at 9.31.54 AM.png
    3.1 MB · Views: 78
VirtualRain said:
In related news, this is on the front page today...

The Promise Pegasus2 R4 is now available without disks for $699. This will be the solution for someone wanting to run multiples SSDs in RAID0. You should be able to get close to 2000 MB/s out of this thing if they did it right.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/HE150VC/A/promise-pegasus2-r4-diskless-4bay-raid-system

Image
Click to expand...


saw that but 2-3 week delivery time while the r4 with drives ships within 24hrs .. same with the r6 and r8.

I have 4 x 4tb hdds here .. can i put them into the r4 ? cuz i remember people with the original versions having issues with large drives:confused:
 
jetjaguar said:
saw that but 2-3 week delivery time while the r4 with drives ships within 24hrs .. same with the r6 and r8.

I have 4 x 4tb hdds here .. can i put them into the r4 ? cuz i remember people with the original versions having issues with large drives:confused:
Click to expand...

Of course, I don't know for sure, but I'd be very surprised if it didn't support 4TB drives. Perhaps make sure a return is possible, and check it out?
 
VirtualRain said:
Of course, I don't know for sure, but I'd be very surprised if it didn't support 4TB drives. Perhaps make sure a return is possible, and check it out?
Click to expand...

yea i am interested in this but i remember reading a lot of posts here with people having issues with the 1st gen
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back