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Share existing storage or go external?
Hi guys, I’ll be moving on from my custom built workstation to a mac studio soon and am thinking about what to do with my storage. I will be keeping my workstation for occasional 3D rending with it’s 3 x GPU setup.
My workstation is a large tower with 6 x 3.5″ 4TB drives attached to a Areca card in RAID 10.
I was thinking about moving the drives into an external QNAP box or similar and sharing the storage between both machines.
HOWEVER…
As the workstation will still physically be there and is already set up with a reliable RAID, is there any reason why I can’t use it as a server and share the storage with the Mac Studio? Both machines have 10GbE capabilities.
My gut feeling says that although it may be technically possible to set up my tower as a server, the software in an external box may be geared more towards delivering consistent performance in a video editing environment. Maybe Bob has drummed this into me over the years haha.
Notes
The workstation is a hackintosh with 3 x nvidia 1080Ti cards but has been rock solid for years. Because of the nvidia cards I’m limited to macOS 10.13.6.
I’m not interested in upgrading or swapping the GPUs as they are sufficient for the occasional 3D work I do.
I also have a Windows installation but would prefer to stick with macOS because I will still be using the machine occasionally.
The two machines won’t be used at the same time, unless perhaps if the tower is rendering I will switch to the Mac but that shouldn’t be a huge drag on the drives.
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4 Replies
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I am more and more troubled by users like Danny, and the other idiots that are using Tolis Bru, and are in a panic that they cannot use Tolis Bru, or their 2010 Mac Pro with their NVidia GPU card any longer. I am old. I will die soon. But I cannot be aggrivated by these users, who are close to retirement, that simply refuse to purchase equipment that is owned now by anyone that is 25 years old or older (except for the OLD BAGS that seem to post here). The Mac Studios are great. The QNAP’s (provided you purchase the correct product) are great. You have 2 computers – no issue. Get a QNAP TVS-h1288X, that has eight SATA drives (it requires two SSD’s to run the QuTS operating system – they cost $89 each – and if you DARE to question that, I will fly to your location and kill you) – and you plug each computers 10G port into each of the QNAP’s dual 10G ports, and now you have a working system that will do exactly what you want. The QNAP TVS-h1288X is about $2750. You spend $89 each for the dual 500 Gig SSD drives, you get eight matching 7200 RPM SATA drives, and now you have exactly what you want. And if you have a wonderful Win10/Win 11 PC, that has the NVidia GPU card – God bless you – because this works perfectly. And if the 2nd computer is the Mac Studio – that is perfect. You now have a wonderful system.
If you dare to try to discuss hardware that was made in 2010 – I will not answer you, I will not support you, and I will not answer any of your stupid questions. I am really getting sick of the old people on this forum, that will not accept reality. You are close to retirement ? I dont’ care – I will be 67 in 2 months. If you do this for a living – you act like a professional, and you buy the appropriate hardware. Your retirement is not my concern. I will die doing this.
Bob Zelin
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And this is exactly what I come here for! Thanks Bob, what you have described as a wonderful system is exactly the kind of thing I will go for.
I realise it was only for my own selfish appeasement that I needed to be dissuaded from my fantasy of gaffer taping two machines together and calling it a shared storage system.
The purpose is just for my personal and occasional freelance work conducted from my modest study space at home. Nevertheless I shouldn’t have indulged in such unprofessional notions.
DO NOT GIVE UP THE FIGHT we need your insights now more than ever!
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Hi bob
Sorrry to interrupt .. need your help in setting up multiuser editing work flow
Can we connect
Thx
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I assume you have received my reply in the email. If you have any further questions, just email me directly.
Bob Zelin
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