Quick question for storage in nMP (for musician)

[VirtualRain]

Are you sure about this ? The Apple store page seems to suggest otherwise:

"The Pegasus2 R4 Diskless System allows existing Mac Pro users upgrading to the newest Mac Pro model to migrate current storage seamlessly. Simply remove your drives from your current Mac Pro and reinstall into the drive trays of the Pegasus2 R4 Diskless system to get instant access to all of your data."

Does this help?

http://store.apple.com/us/question/...osure-will-function-in-jbod/QTCX7YJF44XYCYD9D

I'm fairly certain it does not support JBOD. It's normal for enclosures that support JBOD to clearly indicate that, and Promise doesn't mention it at all.

BTW, JBOD is different from spanning mode or concatenation... these are modes that basically turn multiple drives into one large volume by extending the storage from one disk to others... it's neither RAID NOR JBOD.

 

[dkmooers]

Bummer! RAID 0 it is.

So just put all four drives in there with RAID 0, and backup to a spinny external?

 

[VirtualRain]

Bummer! RAID 0 it is.

So just put all four drives in there with RAID 0, and backup to a spinny external?

Love to get a review from the first person that buys it. Please report back!

 

[dkmooers]

Likely won't be me, since I'm probably going to wait until after the holidays to get my nMP. But if/when I get it and no one's posted a review here, I definitely will!

 

[calaverasgrande]

I would think twice before slapping any old SSD in any old raid box.
Contact the manufacturer of the raid box that fits your needs. Find out which drives they recommend. Some raid array can tolerate mismatched drives, etc. But if you want the best performance and reliablility it behoove syou to do some legwork.
If money is no obstacle than you would probably be best off buying the Drobo (or Synology, Thecus or Promise) with drives already populated.
Not only is this easier, it puts the onus on the manufacturer.
one other thing, always be sure you have a spare (or two) hard drive for your raid. If running raid 5 and you lose a drive, it will likley lose another quite soon after due to increased drive activity and well, bad drives seem to run in batches.
Also, skip La Cie entirely. I see almost twice as many dead La Cie drives as I do Seagate or WD. Their enclosures do not deal with heat well, and last I heard, they are real jerks about the drives that will "work" in their "raid for interior designers".

One other thing, I have been doing digital audio wokstations since pro tools was only stereo 16bit (and wasnt actually called pro tools).

We crossed the point where disk speed really mattered years ago.
I've done projects with hundreds of clips in dozens of tracks. Samples, softsynths, AUs etc.
All this from a Mac mini with a relatively slow hard drive and an SSD for the system volume.

I've even done some serious work in Logic on a MBP with only a single 7200rpm 1TB drive.
not a hiccup.
Fill that sucker with ram and turn off the nonsense that isnt part of an audio engineer workflow.
I would stick with Raid 5 or 6 and maximize your headroom. Dont buy enough space. Buy twice that.

 

[calaverasgrande]

Look at the 3rd table on this page

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4489/promise-pegasus-r6-mac-thunderbolt-review/6

The difference between RAID 0 and RAID 5 is not quite as large as most people think. RAID 10 would be somewhere in between and is especially faster than 5 in write performance. But you get less capacity with RAID 10.

One seldom mentioned advantage of raid 1/0/10 type sets is that they migrate painlessly. If your drive box's controller dies, you can pull the drives out and slap them in somewhere else.
IME Raid 5/6/50/60 etc may or may not work. The implementation is not uniform across all controllers for these types of interleaved drive sets.
Though there are drive recovery applications that can figure it out, it is painful if stuff gets sideways. Especially if your controller makes a mess while it dies!

 

[DPUser]

I've even done some serious work in Logic on a MBP with only a single 7200rpm 1TB drive. not a hiccup.

No doubt, but Virtual Instruments hammer DAWs!

Every typical note requires two voices (stereo). Grab a fistful of notes and you are working your machine like an audio project with that many stereo tracks. Try adding some drums with BFD where each strike can trigger 10 or more samples simultaneously. Or a virtual synth with several layers. Now, start some serious overdubbing. Uses the sustain pedal on your piano with full-length decay samples. Detailed orchestrating. Doubling and Tripling. It is easy to see how the folks doing virtual orchestra work need some pretty serious i/o.

OP, please don't neglect the "back up" once you get your multiple gigs of libraries loaded on your SSDs, especially if you RAID0... re-loading libraries is no fun, and if one SSD fails in RAID0, your whole library is hosed.

One nice thing about SSDs is, because they are so fast, you can use smaller sample RAM buffers, which speeds load time when you start up for the day even more. Look in your sample engine preferences. Not sure, but almost certain that just about every sample-based VI is streaming from disc; only the attack portion of each sample is loaded into RAM.

I'm currently running four SSDs in my hex MP, one for system and apps, one for project and audio files, and two feeding samples to my VIs, with samples allocated in a (hopefully) intelligent manner to maximize throughput. I have yet to "wear out" an SSD, and my system is ridiculously responsive. Don't be afraid to use your SSDs!

And, especially if you are doing sound for picture, don't neglect to check out Digital Performer. I'm a long-time user, not a paid endorser. But I like it a lot.

 

[deconstruct60]

I'm fairly certain it does not support JBOD. It's normal for enclosures that support JBOD to clearly indicate that, and Promise doesn't mention it at all.

You could try reading the manual..... page 92

" ... RAID 0 logical drives on Pegasus consist of one or more physical drives. ..."
http://www.promise.com/support/download_view.aspx?rsn=1559&m=160&region=en-US

Create logical drives that consist of almost exactly the capacity of your individual drives , assign the drives to provision those logic drives, and defacto have a JBOD set up. Technically, they are probably still formatted at the raw level the way Promise wants it but the partition presented to the OS X isn't going to be substantially different. So they can leave JBOD off the 'feature list' because it isn't a "pass through/port multiplier" SATA mode. Pragmatically though, RAID 0 stripe 1 is just a disk.


But yes the notion that you can transparently pull the drives from retired old style Mac Pro and just drop them in and boot up doesn't seem to be supported. (or vice versa.. pull single disk , insert into Mac and boot) You'd need to restore these from backup after they were reformatted.

 

[Promise1]

I'm fairly certain it does not support JBOD. It's normal for enclosures that support JBOD to clearly indicate that, and Promise doesn't mention it at all.

BTW, JBOD is different from spanning mode or concatenation... these are modes that basically turn multiple drives into one large volume by extending the storage from one disk to others... it's neither RAID NOR JBOD.

The Pegasus series including Pegasus 2 supports JBOD mode except we refer to it as "Pass Through". In this mode the drive is exactly left in tact with out us writing DDF (Disk Data Format) on the drive. The customer also can if they want, after backing up the data reconfigure the drives in Hardware RAID mode (RAID 0, 1, 5 or 6).
Hope this helps.

Cheers!

 

[Nugget]

The Pegasus series including Pegasus 2 supports JBOD mode

Excellent, thanks for the answer!

 

[VirtualRain]

The Pegasus series including Pegasus 2 supports JBOD mode except we refer to it as "Pass Through". In this mode the drive is exactly left in tact with out us writing DDF (Disk Data Format) on the drive. The customer also can if they want, after backing up the data reconfigure the drives in Hardware RAID mode (RAID 0, 1, 5 or 6).
Hope this helps.

Cheers!

Well there you go! Thanks for replying. It would help if your marketing people just indicated it supported JBOD to avoid confusion.

 

[mythos]

Hope this helps.

It does indeed - to the extent that I'm now definitely ordering one.

B.

 

[paharrises]

Pegasus2 and WD Red drives

I have WD red 4 TB in my old Mac Pro, waiting for my nMP machine to arrive and trying to figure out what storage device, Drobo 5D or Pegasus2 R4 diskless. The Pegasus2 looks like a much faster solution, but I need to be able to use the WD drives I already have and they are not on the Promise compatibility list. Does that mean it won't work?

 

[cinealta]

No doubt, but Virtual Instruments hammer DAWs!

Do you find your single hex CPU is sufficient for all your virtual instruments playing off the SSDs? Do you use Vienna Ensemble Pro (VEP) or do you feel using it to add an additional slave CPU would be beneficial? Thx

 

[forrests]

Does anyone know if you can get the Pegasus2 diskless R6 or R8 versions or only the R4 diskless?

Also, anyone know if you can hook the Synology NAS units directly into the Mac Pro or do you need to send the input through a router/switch? My system has old switches with 10/100 speed only. Can I hook up a new switch to my wall jack which is putting out 10/100 and get faster speeds by using 2 inputs from the new switch.

Thanks for any help.

 

[DPUser]

Do you find your single hex CPU is sufficient for all your virtual instruments playing off the SSDs? Do you use Vienna Ensemble Pro (VEP) or do you feel using it to add an additional slave CPU would be beneficial? Thx

I don't try to do big orchestra emulations, mostly smaller ensemble, pop, country, folk and jazz stuff often tracking a number of live performers at once. That said, I have not come close to maxing out my W3680 CPU despite simultaneously running BFD, Ivory, Stylus, Wallander and multiple instantiations of Kontakt with a buffer of 128 (for playability), 30-40 or more audio tracks, 6 or more Altiverb instantiations and loads of other plug ins (EQ, Dynamics, Tuning, Delays and other FX) all within a single DP8 64 bit project.

OTOH, many composers doing virtual orchestrations run multiple slave machines under VE Pro to great effect. The nice thing about adding slave CPUs is you can add them if you need them.

Your workflow and the nature of your projects will determine your needs. I am very happy with my 2009 "5,1" hex.

 

[deconstruct60]

Does anyone know if you can get the Pegasus2 diskless R6 or R8 versions or only the R4 diskless?

Only R4 now.

Also, anyone know if you can hook the Synology NAS units directly into the Mac Pro or do you need to send the input through a router/switch?

You can but then nothing else can get to the NAS unit. ( unless enlist the Mac Pro in routing traffic).

My system has old switches with 10/100 speed only.

Which system? You are talking about your overall network system ? Or individual NAS units.

Can I hook up a new switch to my wall jack which is putting out 10/100 and get faster speeds by using 2 inputs from the new switch.

Probably not. Not sure what is behind the wall jack but if the cabling isn't 1GbE ready then will have problems even it connect what is running from wall jack to a different switch. If this is all pre-wired with single port wall plates then problems.

If the NAS has a 1GbE socket and get a 1GbE switch then can get faster speed to Mac Pro ( which has a 1GbE socket). Creates a 1GbE single path to the Mac Pro.

Even if the NAS has two 1GbE sockets that can be bonded/aggregated you may not get a speed increase due to NAS's internals. You'd need 4 sockets on switch to boost path to Mac Pro. Two to the NAS , Two to Mac Pro and aggregate both pairs.

 

[forrests]

Thanks for your answer. What I really want is a TB2 external storage device with RAID 6. I would like to get the 5 disk Drobo 5D but I have heard some bad things about it. I know that they are TB1 but will at some time have a direct TB2 unit. I think that is inevitable. But still to many people are saying that they have problems with the Drobo units. Any comments?

Any recommendation for a substitute device that will use 5 4TB HDDs with RAID 6 and it just really needs to be TB2 or have some other way to connect to the nMP. I don't need network storage.

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[jccrtv]

Promise: "Pass thru" mode?

When using the R6 with JBOD, (I think you call it "Pass-thru" mode) would I be able to have 6 separate drive letters? Or is the only option to have the R6 combine all 6 JBOD into one space? I'm looking to buy one R6 just for raid and another R6 to hold NON-raid, just 6 separate drives (Drive C, Drive D, Drive E, etc). Thank in advance.

The Pegasus series including Pegasus 2 supports JBOD mode except we refer to it as "Pass Through". In this mode the drive is exactly left in tact with out us writing DDF (Disk Data Format) on the drive. The customer also can if they want, after backing up the data reconfigure the drives in Hardware RAID mode (RAID 0, 1, 5 or 6).
Hope this helps.

Cheers!