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What external storage solutions are you going to use with the Mac Studio
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Hi eddie_ducking,
I think they are. That said Seagate it seems has made major improvements to their overall reliability over the years with regards to the IronWolf and Exos range (they had a poor reputation before with regards to their consumer-level drives). They are probably the only two ranges from Seagate I would consider for NAS/RAID use as well as WD Red and Toshiba enterprise grade drives.
many thanks dimme (that was some reading) and Middleman-77
Exos shall be the way forward for the next RAID expansion or disk failure
Exos shall be the way forward for the next RAID expansion or disk failure
I just got a Mac Studio to replace my MP5,1, and I'm curios about your eSATA RAID solution. I have Highpoint RR644L and NewerTech MaxPower RAID PCIe cards and a Sonnet Echo Express two slot PCIe chassis (Thunderbolt 3). Neither card works without drivers, though System Report does see them. The NewerTech driver that is available (1.0.3.3) refuses to install on MacOS 12.6.1 (driver needs to be updated) and I can't find drivers for the Highpoint card. What's your setup?
Synology RS4021xs+ with 16x16TB drives in a RAID 6 with 480gb of mirrored SSD read cache and 10gig Ethernet. Can saturate 3 10gb Ethernet busses without breaking a sweat.
I have a MacStudio Ultra. I’m using two Trebleet dual enclosures with two Samsung 980 2tb in each enclosure. One enclosure is plugged into the MacStudio and the second is daisy chained off of the first. So I have an 8tb drive which gets good speeds. One thing I’m curious about is that, when I boot up, the drive is not seen. I almost always need to boot twice and some times three time before the drive shows up on my screen. Any thoughts? Thanks.
Try not daisy chaining them perhaps. If that doesn't work, grab an enclosure from other world computing.
Thanks for the info. I'm jealous. I need to keep about 8 large HD going, so your solution would be overkill for me.
I've tested another Highpoint card - a non-RAID 644L. This card is recognized and works. It seems as though the port multiplying solutions I used on my Mac Pro are a no-go with the Mac Studio and macOS Monterey. A NAS is probably in my future, but for the time being I can use the Mac Pro as a server for my existing 8 drive enclosures.
I have the following on my Mac Studio...
- Synology NAS
A hangover from the last 2 or 3 Macs it has backups of personal data and some media.
It used to have all my iTunes content, but as I mostly use content via Cloud most of that is gone now. - GTech drive for Time Machine backups.
I keep this seperate from any other uses and it has served me well on last few hardwrae updates. - GTech drive for photos.
I use a newer Gtech drive for all my photo libraries and editing from Lightroom.
Works well and I have not noticed any performance issues.
To be fair it is far faster than my old 27" iMac the Mac Studio replaced where the photos were on the HDD.
iMac user here, but this thread is relevant to my interests. I tried an OWC Thunderbay 4 bay unit in which I installed 4 HDDs. However, this developed a fault (dodgy TB connector), so I had it replaced, but the replacement was also faulty (power issues, it kept turning off then back on again, wouldn't boot up at all), so I got a full refund. IMO, the Thunderbay was quite poor quality really. Similar to £20 HDD enclosures you get online etc. Very dissapointing for a £400 product. I replaced it with a 2-bay cheapish USB-3 enclosure, an Orico unit, and that has been fine. The Thunderbay was a little quicker for data transfer. Meh.
BUT
The issue with both has been noise. The drives are WD Red, so supposedly amongst the quieter ones, but it's still a noisy bugger. What I'd really like, is a nice quiet unit that can sit on my desk and not be a nuisance. Any such thing? The G-Tech RAID unit looks nice, but they come populated and I have 2x8Tb and 2x4Tb drives to house. The 4Tb ones could be put int the Orico enclosure for more occasional use though. Any tips on a nice quiet desktop drive? Or would a NAS like Synology or QNap be ok; I do want fast data transfer, but HDDs, so not going to be the fastest anyway. Any advice greatly appreciated.
BUT
The issue with both has been noise. The drives are WD Red, so supposedly amongst the quieter ones, but it's still a noisy bugger. What I'd really like, is a nice quiet unit that can sit on my desk and not be a nuisance. Any such thing? The G-Tech RAID unit looks nice, but they come populated and I have 2x8Tb and 2x4Tb drives to house. The 4Tb ones could be put int the Orico enclosure for more occasional use though. Any tips on a nice quiet desktop drive? Or would a NAS like Synology or QNap be ok; I do want fast data transfer, but HDDs, so not going to be the fastest anyway. Any advice greatly appreciated.
When you do, consider a Synology 12 bay enclosure and see if you can find a DS3617xs. Plenty powerful and doesn’t freak out if you don’t use Synology brand drives.
Sorry you had a bad experience with OWC TB4. When I was setting up a m1 Mac mini to use as a server their products were the only ones I could get to work reliably. Most of the USB 3 multi bay enclosures I tried would dismount. Their 2 bay TB enclosure with a built in TB hub worked great as does their Thunderbay mini.
I got my Studio a few weeks ago. I attached two Sabrent 5-bay docking stations and a WD 2-disk RAID array in a daisy chain. These give me 54 TB of attached storage plus 1 TB internal SSD for a total of 55 TB. Every important file exists on at least two drives, and I also store about 12 TB of my most precious files offsite with regular updates. Call me paranoid, but I don't want to lose any of my stuff.
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If noise is a priority then you have to go NAS. DAS, particularly multiple bays in a single enclosure, resonates and amplify the hard disk ticking noises, then compound it with the need of large fans that you always get with a fan whine.
A NAS apparently can sit further away from your sitting position or even in the next room so its noisiness is a non factor.
5400 rpm WD Reds are as quiet as mechanical drives get. If that's still too much, the alternative are a) use large capacity SATA SSDs in an enclosure with a quiet fan or passive cooling, or b) get a NAS and store it in a different room. If you get a model with a 10Gb interface, then you won't lose much performance. A small array of spinning disks won't even saturate a 10Gb link, but there is a small penalty to responsiveness due to network overhead.
I just felt the enclosures were not of very good quality. No better than the cheapo USB ones you get off the internet and that. The connections never felt all that secure from the beginning, and then one developed a fault rendering it unusable. The replacement I never actually got to work, because it had some sort of powering up issues, so it just cycld through on/off for ever, without actually starting up. I think it was something like £400 when I bought it, definitely not worth the money. No kind of sound insulation inside, just a metal case. Very dissapointing. Won't be buying that brand again.
Anything I buy needs to have some sort of noise insulation/deadening inside, as a plain metal case can just make any clicks and whirrs noisier. A NAS would need to sit near our router, which is not ideal, and have slower actual transfer speeds than USB, again not ideal. What I'd really like is a nice 4-bay NAS type thing that can connect via Thunderbolt. Why, given that TB has been around for a while now, is there a paucity of such things available?
A slight cross-post from a post I put up today:
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...y-vs-softraid-for-managing-raid-sets.2219413/
Edited version here, so ideally I don't go way off topic. However, I'd love your thoughts on this type of setup.
As a FCPX editor who’s finally getting back into video editing (moving up from 1080p to 4K), I recently jumped on an amazing deal on a "used-but-like-new" Mac Studio base model. As I figured it was time to upgrade from my trusty and maxed-out classic Mac Pro tower, I wanted some solution for all of my hard drives — without resorting to a fanless 3.5” hard drive dock.
So, I bought a "used-but-like-new" OWC Thunderbay 8, which was advertised as coming with a license to SoftRAID XT, which seemed like a fantastic deal. The owner was very kind, but he wasn't a Mac guy and knew little about the unit — especially as it was originally installed for him for his PC by an outside consultant.
Anyhow, I found out that the included license with the OWC Thunderbay 8 was for SoftRAID XT v5 (works only with OWC’s enclosures) and doesn't work on M1. Well, v5 is useless to me on Ventura...and hence the question about upgrading for $80 in my other post...
So now, I’m having some second thoughts per using the Thunderbay 8 for RAIDs at all — which is clearly what it was intended for. As of right now, I’m just using the Thunderbay 8 as one large 8-bay (cooled) drive enclosure/dock (I removed the front door and swapped out the HORRIBLE and loud fan with a Noctua) and using it as one big offline backup unit — hot-swapping drives as needed, and using Chronosync for incremental backups (with drives literally pulled offline). FYI - The Thunderbay 8 does NOT allow the drives to spin down, and even when ejected via Finder - the drives make a repetitive and annoying drive access sound, as generated by the unit. Not happy about this at all.
Put it this way; I’m coming from a hardware-based RAID-0 circa 2016 solution for my FCPX edits, but apparently the new way to do stuff these days for insane editing speeds is to edit off of M.2 media via Thunderbolt 4 and just back everything up to “spinning rust.” I’m guessing that if you need to edit HUGE files in real-time, a Thunderbay 4 or 8 RAID 5 is the way to go. However, as of now - my editing space per a given project is about 1TB. So, on Black Friday, I got an M.2 stick and Thunderbolt 4-compatible enclosure, and hope to do some editing that way.
Again, I'd love your thoughts -- especially from those Thunderbay users. Thanks.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...y-vs-softraid-for-managing-raid-sets.2219413/
Edited version here, so ideally I don't go way off topic. However, I'd love your thoughts on this type of setup.
As a FCPX editor who’s finally getting back into video editing (moving up from 1080p to 4K), I recently jumped on an amazing deal on a "used-but-like-new" Mac Studio base model. As I figured it was time to upgrade from my trusty and maxed-out classic Mac Pro tower, I wanted some solution for all of my hard drives — without resorting to a fanless 3.5” hard drive dock.
So, I bought a "used-but-like-new" OWC Thunderbay 8, which was advertised as coming with a license to SoftRAID XT, which seemed like a fantastic deal. The owner was very kind, but he wasn't a Mac guy and knew little about the unit — especially as it was originally installed for him for his PC by an outside consultant.
Anyhow, I found out that the included license with the OWC Thunderbay 8 was for SoftRAID XT v5 (works only with OWC’s enclosures) and doesn't work on M1. Well, v5 is useless to me on Ventura...and hence the question about upgrading for $80 in my other post...
So now, I’m having some second thoughts per using the Thunderbay 8 for RAIDs at all — which is clearly what it was intended for. As of right now, I’m just using the Thunderbay 8 as one large 8-bay (cooled) drive enclosure/dock (I removed the front door and swapped out the HORRIBLE and loud fan with a Noctua) and using it as one big offline backup unit — hot-swapping drives as needed, and using Chronosync for incremental backups (with drives literally pulled offline). FYI - The Thunderbay 8 does NOT allow the drives to spin down, and even when ejected via Finder - the drives make a repetitive and annoying drive access sound, as generated by the unit. Not happy about this at all.
Put it this way; I’m coming from a hardware-based RAID-0 circa 2016 solution for my FCPX edits, but apparently the new way to do stuff these days for insane editing speeds is to edit off of M.2 media via Thunderbolt 4 and just back everything up to “spinning rust.” I’m guessing that if you need to edit HUGE files in real-time, a Thunderbay 4 or 8 RAID 5 is the way to go. However, as of now - my editing space per a given project is about 1TB. So, on Black Friday, I got an M.2 stick and Thunderbolt 4-compatible enclosure, and hope to do some editing that way.
Again, I'd love your thoughts -- especially from those Thunderbay users. Thanks.
What’s up with the OWC Ministack STX for Mac Studio? They announced that ig would launch in the fall so I expect it any day now .
Supply and demand. There is less and less of a need of premium quality, multi-bay DAS since the effort isn't worth the rather shrinking market. It seems to be one major factor is how affordable a bunch of storage and network related tech has become, namely large TB disks, 10G NIC / switch, multi-bay enclosures, and software. Something as capable of a Synology 8bay with a 10G NIC, stuffed with all 18TB disks, would have cost 10 times that not too long ago.
Then, many fields in creative business have grown their needs but others not as much, as in photography and prepress or even music production, none of them are as demanding as say cutting edge video editing. Therefore I am seeing a trend where workflows used to rely on DAS out of necessity, are now happily replaceable with a NAS route, abit with an upfront cost and also learning curve in using it. The flip side is that a decent DAS is then cornered upwards to the use cases where the performance of a NAS is not cutting it or that the shop does not have the budget for enterprise grade network SAS infrastructure. A DAS is only called when it's a 16bay shuttle, or a 4slot NVMe RAID0 enclosure.
How can the market be shrinking when the need for external storage is growing? Less people are using computers with oodles of onboard storage these days; iMacs, MacBooks, even the Studio all need external storage if you need anything beyond what's built in. More and more people are using external storage from USB sticks to full on RAID rack mounted systems. The number of USB drives available is staggering. So why a paucity of faster connections such as USB4 and TB?
I just want a decent quality enclosure. I'll settle for USB3; my cheapo Orico is fine, it's just not very well made, and noisy. The OWC Thunderbay was of similar quality, and at least one other poster here has mentioned the crappy cheap noisy fan. Data transfer speeds were great, but to actually access a file from 'cold', it involved the discs spinning up and taking some time to find the correct ones. And then if left on, the whole unit could randomly spin up the drives even when not in use. So noisy, it had to be switched off at night, lest it keep us awake. By comparison, an old WD MyCloud Home drive I have connected to the router is very quiet indeed, just a faint hum. The only issue with that, is the slow network speed. Transferring several Gb of data at a time is very slow indeed. I want something like that but faster. And with 4 bays.
My above post elaborated on exactly which segment that is shrinking. Of course the overall demand of storage has never been as high as now, but there are other means to which that serve this purpose better as in NAS, cloud, SAS, or even internal boot drives on your Mac.
A DAS has its place when really high throughput is needed (RAIDs of NVMs) or at the same time a large capacity (16-24 bays of RAIDed HDDs). And sometimes software demands local storage no matter what (despite possibility of iSCSI LUNs which pretends a NAS as a DAS). Most of the vendors see this and has started to put less efforts in making semi-pro DAS enclosures that are "only" 4 bay or less.
To put it in perspective, my studio is deploying a Synology DS1821+ with 8bays all Ultrastar 12TB disks, dual 1TB NVMe SSD cache, a dual SFP+ network card aggregated into a 20Gbps line, connected to a 20G backbone serving a team with everyone having 10G connecting to the switch. We are consistently pounding close to the theoretical 10gbps (1250MB/s) limit of this setup even when dealing with small files that depends random read and write as opposed to sequential. We also still use "DAS" but they are single sticks of NVMe SSDs in TB3 enclosures. We have phased out all those 2-4 bays of HDD DAS which filled our rooms tens years ago.
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Please explain how I can put extra storage into a 24" M1 iMac...
That's just conjecture. I really don't think that segment is 'shrinking' as you suggest, given the increased popularity in 2 and 4-bay NAS units. There are plenty of 4-bay USB3 enclosures out there too. But so far, not TB3/USB4, unless you want populated units, which I don't, already having 2x8Tb and 2x4Tb drives. NAS is fine for archive and bulk storage, but I need something which allows me to access a large amount of photos (8Tb worth and growing). Not many Macs come with 8Tb onboard storage anyway. 8Tb of storage for a Mac Studio is an extra £2400m (extra onboard storage for any Mac is obscenely expensive), and then what do you back it up to? You see? I can't be the only person who needs a fast 4-bay external storage unit. What's this entire thread about??
But what's the point of telling me this? That's hideously expensive and complete overkill for my needs. There is a big gap between such 'enterprise' and basic home use desktop storage. That's my complaint.
My problem stems from making the mistake of buying an OWC Thunderbay 4, and another 2 8Tb HDDs. This proved to be an unsatisfactory solution. I am now considering cutting my losses and buying a populated unit, such as a LaCie or Seagate/WD G-Raid unit, and a basic NAS for the two 8Tb drives as an extra backup. I just want something on my desktop that's fast and reliable, and instantly accessible. I'm even considering a fast SSD drive, that backs up to a NAS, but the problem there is having to employ some kind of incremental ongoing backup system.
So; Macs with potential 40Gb/s file transfer, but hardly any hardware to actually make use of this. Poor.
I am sorry to see your frustration in not having as good or as many options in multi-bay DAS, I was just offering you perspectives in why it is the case now. If course it is all conjectures on my part but I myself have been in multiple disciplines that all involved Macs and storages of some kind, and this is what I am seeing. Vanilla DAS is an oddity now because some (not all but some) of its previous users have moved on to other media one way or another. That's what I meant in shrinking, vanilla DAS filled larger segments of use than it does now. As such, vendors find themselves less inclined in developing and improving which is why we still see those shady and unreliable boxes even from reputable brands.
Just my two cents.
Just my two cents.
Yeah, the teaser video (at 5:20) from NAMM 2022 on the Mini Stack Studio looked very interesting.
I asked OWC about this a month ago and was told they didn't have an ETA. No other info was given.