Thunderbay 4 mini vs Caldigit T4?

[armut]

Hello,

I need your recommendation between Thunderbay 4 mini and Caldigit T4.

I'm editing videos with FCP X and need more storage, so I want to buy one of these systems.
I also want to put in 4 SSD drives to get the maximum speed but first I will just put two SSDs inside and after a while two more.

Can you help to decide which to buy?

Thanks in advance

 

[hollyhillbilly]

Armut,
If you want the best answer, I would post at, https://forums.creativecow.net/raid. They will have the best answer without bias.

 

[i make movies]

What is your ideal size?
What is your ideal speed?
What kind of footage are you currently working with?
What connection is preferred? TB2? USB3?

Do you need long term storage? i.e. do you need a RAID5 to make it safe, or a RAID0 for speed?

 

[armut]

What is your ideal size?
What is your ideal speed?
What kind of footage are you currently working with?
What connection is preferred? TB2? USB3?

Do you need long term storage? i.e. do you need a RAID5 to make it safe, or a RAID0 for speed?

My ideal size for now is about 2TB.
Ideal speed is more than 1000MBs.
I'm mostly on weddings and make a "behind the scene" while photographing them.
I prefer thunderbolt because USB 3.0 is not as fast as thunderbolt?

At the moment I don't need RAID5 just RAID0.

Armut,
If you want the best answer, I would post at, https://forums.creativecow.net/raid. They will have the best answer without bias.

Thank you, I will ask there too.

 

[i make movies]

I would suggest the Thunderbay 4 Mini.

You mentioned starting with 2 SSD and eventually going to 4.

You cannot buy the CalDigit T4 bare. You have to buy it with drives.

With the ThunderBay 4 mini, you can buy it bare and add whatever 2.5" drives you want.

 

[armut]

Hmm, okay.
I could not read anywhere if the system is a soft- or hardware raid.
If its a software raid, how much power will it use from my CPU? Do you know?

 

[i make movies]

It's a software RAID...the Thunderbay 4 Mini actually comes with a copy of SoftRAID 5.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB4MSR0GB/

I use SoftRAID right now and it's great.

This is copy and pasted from SoftRAID's FAQ page regarding CPU usage.


How much will SoftRAID slow down my Mac?
When you are using SoftRAID for both your startup volume and all your data volumes, the SoftRAID Monitor and driver will use less than 0.2% of one of your Mac's CPUs. On a the average Mac Pro, that means that SoftRAID will be using less than 0.01% of your CPU power. In addition, all parts of SoftRAID will be using less than 30 MB of your physical RAM. We have designed SoftRAID to have as little impact on the speed of your system as possible. This allows SoftRAID to be very usable on a 533 MHz PowerMac G4 with 512 MB of RAM.

Even when you are performing a mirror rebuild on more than one volume, the driver is still using less than 1% of the power of one CPU. If you find that your Mac is not as responsive as you want during a mirror rebuild, you can change the optimization for that volume which will give your work higher priority over the mirror rebuild operation.


If you have more questions regarding SoftRAID...

https://www.softraid.com/pages/support/faq.html

Fun Fact: SoftRAID is developed and written by the team who wrote the original AppleRAID utility back in OSX7.

 

[Bytehoven]

I have been using SoftRAID Lite for awhile to build a SAS RAID0 on an ATTO H680. Now while SoftRAID RAID0 is not as fast as a hard RAID0 built on an ATTO R680 in the same cMP, the SoftRAID is better than a RAID0 built by Disk Utility. We started using SoftRAID when it was clear easy RAID support was being buried with OS X 10.11.x.

SoftRAID Lite and the full version of SoftRAID use the same engine... the full version just offers more RAID choices.

 

[multipasser]

Caldigit willl release the new T4 TB3 version this month!! So stay tuned. I got iMac Pro 10c and waiting for this also! Other only hardware 5 raid option is the AReca 4/6/8/12 bay !! you can add drives yourself. It is hardwar 5/6/10 raid and uses TB3.