-
RAID solution for Mac Pro
Hi All,
I’m hoping to make a decision on this very quickly so I appreciate your feedback. I am looking to set up a RAID in my Mac Pro. I currently have a 750 GB OS Drive and a 1 TB media drive. I am looking at putting 3 of these 2 TB drives in – https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136456 . My concern is I read that WD drives need TLER to be RAID compatible and this one doesn’t seem to have it.
Let me know if you feel like this is a good solution – it’s much cheaper than using the drives from Apple, and I just want to make sure I’m not shooting myself in the foot…though either way I’ll still end up with 6 TB worth or storage instead of 1.
Thanks,
Mark
-
5 Replies
-
For RAID you should really get the WD RE3 or RE4 drives, because they are much more reliable and also faster, exactly what you need for a RAID array. And yeah – don’t buy drives from Apple 🙂
Nace,
-
Hi Nace,
Thanks for the quick response. Do you think that the drive I posted would work. We’re making a big purchase and I’m trying to save a few bucks and that will save me over $300 if I buy the drive above as opposed to a RE 4 drive but I don’t want to do it if it won’t work.
Thanks,
Mark -
It would probably work in RAID (although many people say it’s not the best drive for it), I have the 1 TB version of that drive (not in RAID) and am very very happy with it, no problems whatsoever.
The RE4 is a tad high priced for 2 TB and for non-critical use the Caviar Black will work fine, just make sure to back everything up, as a RAID 0 array loses all data if just one of the drives fail.
Nace,
-
Hello.
I have heard about the TLER setting on the drives. A while ago I saw that there’s a program that WD makes for windows that will enable it on the WD drives.
Here’s a link (after a really, really quick search) that I found with some info.
I do have one thing to say, which you can take it or leave it. This is from a long time ago (at least 3 years) so things most definitely have changed. But…I remember buying WD RE2 drives, three of them, and put them each in different Mac Pros. Within a week all three went down. They were not in a RAID array whatsoever (and again, they were in three different systems). I don’t know if that makes a real difference as I haven’t searched for that, but I wouldn’t imagine it would.
Interesting thing is that I have gotten lots on non-RE WD drives and they all work fine. As a side note, I have a server with WD drives (non-RE) in a software RAID on linux and haven’t had an issue with it (yet…).
Again, research, research, research. Hope this can help in some way.
~ Loïc
-
Thanks all for the response. I think I will go with these drives- may not RAID them and if I do I have a 2 TB time capsule that I can use to store the original AVC-HD footage and then use the RAID drive as my primary edit drive – using the three drive bays open in the mac pro and disk utility as was suggested to me in another thread. I think 6 TB worth of ProRes422 should be less than or about 2 TB of AVC-HD
Thoughts?
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up