Which storage option?

[johnbarr00]

Hi there, I am about to do a big upgrade to my computer storage. I am a videographer and I work with a lot of high resolution footage for editing. I was just looking for some advice about which direction to go for the upgrade. I am currently using a USB 3.0 4-Bay Raid tower (Raid 5) 4 x 4TB drives for 12TB total storage. I love the system for 4K playback and data redundancy but it's almost full.

Ideally, I want to move to an 8-bay raid system set up in Raid 6. I will fill it 5TB drives for a total of 30TB usable storage.

My question comes down to which Raid unit to purchase. Is Thunderbolt 2 necessary? What about NAS enclosures using a thunderbolt to LAN adaptor?

I am looking at the "HighPoint RocketStor 6318A Thunderbolt 2 Hardware RAID 8-Bay Tower Enclosure" or the "Areca ARC-8050T2 Dual Thunderbolt 2.0 8-Bay Raid."

For USB, I'm looking at this one "Mediasonic ProRaid H8R2-SU3S2 8 Bay USB 3.0 & eSATA"

For NAS LAN, I'm looking at this one "Synology Disk Station 8-Bay (DS1815+)"

Any advice in my upgrade process is appreciated! Thank you!

 

[johnbarr00]

anyone?!

 

[matreya]

I've heard good things about the Areca RAID. Thunderbolt 2 is considerably faster than USB 3 enclosures.

Unless you need a NAS, you're basically sacrificing speed for networking capability. Gigabit ethernet is slower than a single 7200 RPM HDD, so you won't gain the speed that RAID offers.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the usable storage from an 8 x 5TB RAID6 array is 20TB. 30TB is the space you'd have if you only deployed RAID5.