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MP 1,1-5,1 Raid 0 with 6 drives in Mac Pro 4,1? Need more space! Advice needed.

M

m3rob

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 28, 2010
41
7
Hi guys,

I am running my Mac Pro 4,1 with 4-4TB hard drives in Raid-0 and it has been running flawlessly for the past few years. I film a lot of 4k Raw video footage so I am could use some more space. I was thinking of getting 6 10TB drives. I would use 4 in the sleds and then 2 in the optical drive area for a total of 6 running at raid-0. I am running my system off an SSD on a pci card. Is it ok to run all 6 drives on the computer in Raid-0? I always backup my files in case the raid-0 fails, but just wanted to know how reliable running 6 would be compared to the 4 I am already running. I understand it is less reliable because running 6 is more than 4 and that is 2 more drives that could fail, but I was just wondering if it would be too much for the system?

Also, if I were to get more space by running an external attached storage in a 4 or 6 bay unit, what would I need to get read and write speeds of at least around 400-500 MB/s? Is it best to run the unit with 10 Gigibit ethernet connection to a Synology or other Has with a card from Sonnet Technology (https://www.sonnettech.com/product/solo10g-pcie-card.html)? Or should I get a box that just uses USB 3.0 the would connect to my pci card? Could I get raid-0 speeds for over 400 MB/s with USB 3.0? Maybe I connect with some entirely different method?

Any ideas you guys have I would love to hear. I could be on totally the wrong track. Haha. Thanks in advance!

Rob
 
What is your project size?

you could invest in a highpoint 7102 NVme Carrier board and populate it with four 2TB SSD giving you 8TB of really fast media disk.

use the spinning hard drives as back up.
 
I looked at a similar thing not so long ago. Compared internal disks (4TB SSD x 4) with moving the storage external and connecting via 10GigE. I'm on a PC btw, but the same principles apply as you don't have Thunderbolt. The conclusion I came to was that I could have the throughput I wanted, easy upgrade/expansion and redundancy too by moving the storage external. I installed a single dual-port 10GigE card and connected it to a QNAP NAS. I could reuse my existing 4 x 1TB SSD's that I'd been using in a Windows Storage Space and use them as a cache tier in conjunction with 4 x 4TB HDD's. This was much cheaper than buying 4 x 4TB SSD's and it gives me around 2GB/s throughput sustained with large files, and it's usually over 1GB/s regardless of file size. I can also set some folders on there to replicate offsite in the background so I've offloaded some backup tasks.

If I need to upgrade at any point I can just add bigger HDD's it just happened that 4TB HDD's were the sweet spot with regards to price when I bought them.

Overall happy with the performance it's a more flexible solution than internal disks and worked out cheaper than I originally planned. I also chose QNAP over Synology (although I prefer Synology's software) because of the huge choice of hardware - they have quite a few models with built in 10GigE and both 2.5" and 2.3" bays for tiering. I could have used NVME SSD's too, but I already had a bunch of SATA SSD's.
 
Last edited:
shaunp said:
I looked at a similar thing not so long ago. Compared internal disks (4TB SSD x 4) with moving the storage external and connecting via 10GigE. I'm on a PC btw, but the same principles apply as you don't have Thunderbolt. The conclusion I came to was that I could have the throughput I wanted, easy upgrade/expansion and redundancy too by moving the storage external. I installed a single dual-port 10GigE card and connected it to a QNAP NAS. I could reuse my existing 4 x 1TB SSD's that I'd been using in a Windows Storage Space and use them as a cache tier in conjunction with 4 x 4TB HDD's. This was much cheaper than buying 4 x 4TB SSD's and it gives me around 2GB/s throughput sustained with large files, and it's usually over 1GB/s regardless of file size. I can also set some folders on there to replicate offsite in the background so I've offloaded some backup tasks.

If I need to upgrade at any point I can just add bigger HDD's it just happened that 4TB HDD's were the sweet spot with regards to price when I bought them.

Overall happy with the performance it's a more flexible solution than internal disks and worked out cheaper than I originally planned. I also chose QNAP over Synology (although I prefer Synology's software) because of the huge choice of hardware - they have quite a few models with built in 10GigE and both 2.5" and 2.3" bays for tiering. I could have used NVME SSD's too, but I already had a bunch of SATA SSD's.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info, shaunp! Which QNAP did you go with? You get 2GB/s read/write when you just connect your QNAP with Cat 6 to the 10GigE card? Thats super fast! And cool because that device can go to the next computer down the line.
 
I went for a TS-932X-2G. It comes with 2GB RAM, but I upgraded it to 8GB with a standard SODIMM from Amazon.

It's not Cat6 for this NAS it's SFP+, but there are plenty of NIC's around that do this and switches too if you ever add a second machine. One thing I did have to do was edit the smb.conf on the NAS to enable multipathing on SMB so it uses both paths to increase the throughput. By default it will only use one. I direct attached it to the computer using SFP+ cables. QNAP do other models with standard RJ45 ports for 10GigE but they are a lot more expensive. The TS-932X was around £500 without disks. With disks, 10G NIC and cables with was around £1100, which was cheaper than 4 x 4TB SSD.

Yes, get 2GB/s and that's with 4TB HDD's in RAID5 and 4 x 1TB SDD's as cache. TBH you could probably use just 2 smaller SSD's for the cache and get similar speed I just already had these.

And you are right you can use it on the next computer, it's all just standard parts and just works.
 
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