need advice to buy new raid

Storage & Archiving

need advice to buy new raid

Posted by Craig Alan on November 23, 2018 at 12:35 am

Current set up

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015)
4 GHz Intel Core i7
40 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
MD Radeon R9 M395X 4096 MB

3 units of the 4 drive OWC Thunderbay raids with
HGST NAS 6TB SATA 7200 RPM drives

I use OWC SoftRaid for formatting my drives and monitoring their health.
I organize my projects into folders within a RAID 5 or JBOD.
Then I back up to same capacity single drives for each folder which will be 80% of the size of the drive/folders that populate the raids

Looking for a new raid enclosure. Plan to move to all 4K projects.
Been using 1080P

Is Areca OR G-technology a good choice????

I think 6bays w 8TB drives is a good bang for the buck given my needs.

Open to Suggestions?

Will the SAS drives be a good choice?
Seagate 8TB Enterprise Capacity 7200 rpm SAS III 3.5″ Internal HDD
B&H # SEST8000NM75

Told they are more reliable and faster than SATA?
I assume I can still back up media to individual drives using:
OWC Drive Dock Thunderbolt 2/USB 3.0 Dual Drive Bay Solution B&H # OWTB2U3DKR2
and SATA drives
I’m not a fast editor. But I do want reliable gear and do get stressed some times how long it takes to back up drives and …large ingests.
If I buy a new Mac will Thunderbolt 2 still be usable with Thunderbolt 3 outlets on Mac. Will new OS start working ok with FCPX?

Imacs (i7), Canon C300, Canon 5D Mark IV, Panasonic ENG HPX250P, , FCP X, teach video production in L.A., Cool Light Productions, Producing series of multimedia Portraits of creative women in the production arts.

Rainer Wirth replied 7 years, 5 months ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

Rainer Wirth
November 23, 2018 at 8:36 am

First question:
Do you have Thunderbolt 3 or 2?
The best speed within a raid you get with a minimum of 8 drives, better more (16 or 24 bay).
I would run the raid (minimum of 8bay) with raid 6 level.
We’ve got a thunderbolt 3 Netstore raid. It’s good.
Areca raid card is a good choice. The advantages of the Netstor raid are 4 PCIx slots within the Raid enclosure.
So we have one slot for a FC Raidcard (connect older FC systems), one for the areca raid card, and one slot for Video/audio breakout card for monitoring.
Your Raid5 owc’s are good for back-up,

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems
Rainer Wirth
November 23, 2018 at 8:38 am

by the way, we work with 10TB enterprise HD’s,

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems
Craig Alan
November 24, 2018 at 1:24 pm

For now, my needs are for a 6 drives w 8TB per drive. I’m a one man band.

My current Imac uses thunderbolt 2 but don’t think it will be a long wait to move to thunderbolt 3.
I assume i can use a B&H # APMMEL2AMA Apple Thunderbolt 3 Male to Thunderbolt 2 Female Adapter converter to use my older raids for backups?

Imacs (i7), Canon C300, Canon 5D Mark IV, Panasonic ENG HPX250P, , FCP X, teach video production in L.A., Cool Light Productions, Producing series of multimedia Portraits of creative women in the production arts.
Rainer Wirth
November 26, 2018 at 12:45 pm

Hi Craig,

the thunderbolt adapter will do the job.
If you’re going for a new computer with TB3, your raid system is up to date.
I strongly recommend a 8 bay drive system, because of speed.
The price difference is not so much, and you look a little into the future,

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

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