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Hard drives max capacity for MacPro early 2009
hey folks…
have a macpro early 2009, with 3 TB (1TBx3) runing as raid 0, what is the max capacity i can reach? 6 TB (2TBx3) or 9TB (3×3) or hopefully 12 TB (4TBx3)why 3? i need 1 pay for the OS 😀
NB, runing mountain Lion 10.8
thanks
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3 Replies
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You can use 4 Tb SATA-3 hdds with no problems. 12 Tb of unprotected RAID 0! But how long will it last is a totally different issue.
I have quite a few older Mac Pros and they’re still more expandable than the 2014 Mac Pros w/ Thunderbolt expansion. Not that it’s my biz, but putting a 4 Tb on raid 0 (stripping with no parity) increases the risk factor of 3x. Literally if 1 of the 3 hdds die, you’re out of luck by 3x. And I have purchased a significant amount of hdds for 4K footage. None of the 3 top vendors will last forever. They will fail at some point in the future. To me data is exponentially more precious than trying to save $160 for a 4 Tb hdd as a mirrored array. So far I can only put two 4 Tbs as raid 1 and the remaining 4 Tb for single 4 Tb hdd plus another for the OS & boot hd.
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i got your point, so what about using the system HD on the second optical drive bay? and 16TB 4×4, on board bays, what is the perfect raid level to use for video editing 2K and? im talking about 8tb as mirror.
raid 1 only works with a pair of disks.
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The ideal raid level for uncompromised quality editing is RAID 10 (stripping with mirroring). Next economical solution for me is RAID 5, 50 (8 hdds needed), then 60. But you’ll need a 3rd party RAID card & external drive bays. Apple’s built in software raid 0 or 1 is OK but it’s not hardware accelerated like w/ the ATTO HBA or other SATA RAID cards. I’m not sure if Apple RAID support raid 10. If it does, I’d use that. The minimum is 4 identical hdds. You can have two dead hdds w RAID 10 and it’s still running (at half the speed). And there are vendor-specific RAID schemes that’s somewhat proprietary. But they’re optimized for video editing.
From the trend of the new smaller sized Mac Pro, putting four 4 Tb hdds in bay 1-4 and use the 2nd optical drive as the boot drive is probably the most economical solution with older silver colored Mac Pro. Eventually you’ll have to get to the Thunderbolt bandwagon and that’ll cost at least $5-10K for the new Thunderbolt enclosure. No thank you. I’ll wait at least several years for price to come down and design to stabilize. I’m not doing heavy 4K now. Still 1080p. 8 Tb of RAID 1 via Apple software RAID will do 1080p workflow just fine for many years to come. I’m actually getting very fast performance when editing w/ AVC-I 100 and Pro Res 422 HQ 1080p w/ the Apple software RAID.
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