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

Question for external storage with nMP

A

allupons

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 11, 2010
94
0
I am trying to sort out what solution will work best for me regarding external storage with the new mac pro. I would like all of my internal drives in a single enclosure, but I would prefer to avoid a raid setup that would require me to double everything in order to truly have a backup (redundancy is not backup)

I believe the solution might be JBOD, but I don't actually know for sure how JBOD works and my searching thus far has been inconclusive. If I drop 4 drives into a thunderbolt enclosure and use JBOD, will OS X see all the disks separately exactly as if they were internal drives? This is exactly what I am trying to accomplish, so if anyone has experience with this, that would be awesome. My concern is some make it sound like JBOD is just another type of raid where you can mix and match any type/size HDD and end up with what OS X would think is a very large single disk, which I am not interested at all in.

So is it possible to have a single enclosure with an array of disks show up as a number of disks in OS X just as if they were all separate internal drives? Thanks for any help!
 
allupons said:
I am trying to sort out what solution will work best for me regarding external storage with the new mac pro. I would like all of my internal drives in a single enclosure, but I would prefer to avoid a raid setup that would require me to double everything in order to truly have a backup (redundancy is not backup)

I believe the solution might be JBOD, but I don't actually know for sure how JBOD works and my searching thus far has been inconclusive. If I drop 4 drives into a thunderbolt enclosure and use JBOD, will OS X see all the disks separately exactly as if they were internal drives? This is exactly what I am trying to accomplish, so if anyone has experience with this, that would be awesome. My concern is some make it sound like JBOD is just another type of raid where you can mix and match any type/size HDD and end up with what OS X would think is a very large single disk, which I am not interested at all in.

So is it possible to have a single enclosure with an array of disks show up as a number of disks in OS X just as if they were all separate internal drives? Thanks for any help!
Click to expand...

Yes, that's what JBOD is... Just A Bunch of Disks. :) If you get an enclosure that supports JBOD and run it in this mode, you'll see all your disks separately. If all you need is JBOD, then a USB 3 interface should be sufficient... Thunderbolt is overkill. This is the best multi-bay JBOD USB3 enclosure I've seen to date...
http://oyendigital.com/hard-drives/store/3R5-EB3-M.html
 
VirtualRain said:
Yes, that's what JBOD is... Just A Bunch of Disks. :) If you get an enclosure that supports JBOD and run it in this mode, you'll see all your disks separately. If all you need is JBOD, then a USB 3 interface should be sufficient... Thunderbolt is overkill. This is the best multi-bay JBOD USB3 enclosure I've seen to date...
http://oyendigital.com/hard-drives/store/3R5-EB3-M.html
Click to expand...

How is the fan? Noisy? Can you turn it off?
 
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
Cubemmal said:
How is the fan? Noisy? Can you turn it off?
Click to expand...

The Oyen Digital does have good reviews ...

Or maybe a better question - how noisy are 5 spinning drives :)

There is a 4 bay 2.5" drive unit that is TB I am trying out later this week...

http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicmultidock

but it is almost 3X the price of the USB3 solution and has no pass thru TB port... and is as yet unknown if it is really SATA II or SATA III inside :)...
 
propower said:
The Oyen Digital does have good reviews ...

Or maybe a better question - how noisy are 5 spinning drives :)

There is a 4 bay 2.5" drive unit that is TB I am trying out later this week...

http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicmultidock

but it is almost 3X the price of the USB3 solution and has no pass thru TB port... and is as yet unknown if it is really SATA II or SATA III inside :)...
Click to expand...

Nice... make sure you post a review here... lots of folks will be interested in that.
 
VirtualRain said:
Nice... make sure you post a review here... lots of folks will be interested in that.
Click to expand...

Will do!
Was a really hard choice to cough up the dough - but still looked like the only one that will do what i want :) .. Even SATA II not really a deal breaker if true... will know more by the end of the week...
 
Last edited:
VirtualRain said:
Yes, that's what JBOD is... Just A Bunch of Disks. :) If you get an enclosure that supports JBOD and run it in this mode, you'll see all your disks separately. If all you need is JBOD, then a USB 3 interface should be sufficient... Thunderbolt is overkill. This is the best multi-bay JBOD USB3 enclosure I've seen to date...
http://oyendigital.com/hard-drives/store/3R5-EB3-M.html
Click to expand...

Thanks for the confirmation that JBOD behaves as I was hoping and treats every disk separately. While USB3 is definitely fast enough I am likely stuck going thunderbolt since I have a MacBook Pro that has thunderbolt but no USB3, so if I want internal drive matching speeds on both computers I will have to spend a ton of extra cash on getting the thunderbolt connection for the enclosure...
 
propower said:
The Oyen Digital does have good reviews ...

Or maybe a better question - how noisy are 5 spinning drives :)

There is a 4 bay 2.5" drive unit that is TB I am trying out later this week...

http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicmultidock

but it is almost 3X the price of the USB3 solution and has no pass thru TB port... and is as yet unknown if it is really SATA II or SATA III inside :)...
Click to expand...

Pro. Look forward to your upcoming report. It's a toss up between BM and Drobo mini for me. Mini has pass through port and I'm still weighing whether this is the one for me.
 
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