Bob Zelin
10
COW Coins
6
Storage & Archiving Coins
Forum Replies Created
-
Hi Mel –
with Big Sur, it’s over. Up through 10.15.7 Catalina, I would go into recovery mode on the Mac, and disable System Integrity Protection, by typing into terminal “csrutil disable” and reboot the Mac. Then I could load Sonnet Twin 10G and Promise SanLink2 drivers. But with the introduction of Big Sur 11.x, that no longer seems to work. Apple has become very very aggressive about not allowing old “obsolete” hardware to work – probably because they want you to buy a new Thunderbolt 3 computer ! (no crying about how your 2013 Mac Pro is still working perfectly fine – Apple won’t have your tears !). So the only thing that is working on the old T2 computers is the Sonnet Solo 10G T2, which is $199, (I think it just went up in price) – and you will get HALF the performance that you got on a Twin 10G or SanLink2 – because it’s buss powered, and a T2 port can’t supply enough power to allow it to run at full speed. For a Thunderbolt 3 computer – the SanLink3, Promise Solo 10G T3, or the QNAP QNA-T310G1T will work at full speed – and those are buss powered (but you are now on a new Thunderbolt 3 computer).
Listen Mel – you can’t win. You are going to have to buy new Apple computers. I don’t care if you don’t have the money. Tim Cook doesn’t give a damn if you and your family starve – he wants you to give him YOUR money, and buy a new computer. It’s 2021, and he needs a new helicopter !
Bob Zelin
-
No one is making a new Thunderbolt 2 RAID array. Thunderbolt 3 is the current RAID’s (compatible with Thunderbolt 4). You cannot future proof. You will spend money on electronic equipment until you die. This is how all electronic companies make so much money. When you refuse to update, they make sure that your older computers will not run the new operating system, or will not be able to run the new software. And all the companies want to always sell you new software, so they can make money – and this requires the new operating system for computers – which of course, needs to run on newer computers. The same thing applies to drives. And don’t worry about the drives – because drives fail, after about 5 years. SATA drives fail, and yes – SSD drives fail. So you will keep buying those – FOREVER. How do you avoid spending money on new equipment for 10 years ? You don’t – you can’t. Not if you do this for a living. You will always spend your hard earned money on new equipment. Everyone in the world does this. We are not working with antique wonderfully made piano’s and violins – all this electronic equipment becomes obsolete. And these days – it seems quicker than ever.
Bob
-
Hello Michel –
30 editors is a lot of editors on a single system, even for a Terrablock Hub 16. You want to do Apple ProRes 1080 HD at 25 fps. That is 17.27 MB/sec (AJA Data Calc). So that is 1036 MB/sec total bandwidth.
With a 16 bay NAS, you get about 1800 MB/sec total aggregate bandwidth. So for QNAP, you would choose a QNAP TS-h1683XU-RP. You put in 16 Seagate EXOS drives, all in a single RAID group. This is one of the new models that runs ZFS, so for this model you need a QNAP QM2 card with 2 480 Gig M.2 SATA drives to hold the operating system. It’s $6700 for the empty chassis. 16TB Seagate EXOS drives run about $330 each today. And you need 16 of those.
If you choose a Synology, I suggest the new Synology RS4021xs+. This does not need a separate card to run the operating system (BTRFS). Both the Synology and QNAP come complete with enough RAM and the 10G ports that you need, so no options are necessary here. You will link aggregate the 2 10G ports to your 10G switch. This model is $5400
The switch you need is a Netgear XS748T. This is a 44 port 10G switch (all copper Cat 6 connection) with 4 additional SFP+ ports for connection to your NAS, where you will do your LACP to the 10G ports. It’s $3200 on Amazon.
Obviously, the cost of 30 computers with 10G ports will cost a lot more money than either of these 2 NAS systems.
They will work perfectly fine for your application. I do this stuff every day.
-
Hi Pedro
a) QNAP specifically states in every description of any QuTS product to put the operating system on the SSD’s, not the disks. You can put them on the disks (I did this by accident the first time I built one), but it is the wrong thing to do. I guess you can put them on the internal M.2 drives, but if one of them fails, then you have to open up the QNAP to change it. If it’s in the SSD slots, you just pop out the defective SSD, and replace it.
b) I don’t know. with RAID 6, you get 1000 MB/sec. I don’t see the benefit of RAID 50. I did a RAID 60 on a QNAP TS-h2483XU-RP back in March, because I was using 16TB drives, and a normal QTS volume can’t be larger than 250 TB. I saw no performance benefit from doing a RAID 60. I cannot answer you on the RAID 50.
c) you can make the SSD’s into a separate volume
c2) I have no answer for you.
d) you will see no benefit with 40G using SATA drives. A 40G connection will give you 2200 MB/sec performance, and 12 SATA drives do not have the total aggregate bandwidth of 2200 MB/sec.
e) stop asking questions, and just hire me to set this up for you. It will work perfectly when we get done.
-
2 SSD’s for your RAID 1 operating system – Storage Pool 1 with 2 of the SSD’s.
forget the Caching
all 12 drives (yes – ALL 12 DRIVES) in a single raid group – RAID 6 thin provisioning as storage Pool 1 (max size).
Your 10G port goes to a 10G switch. You plug your 3 computers into that 10G switch with 10G adapters. All static IP addresses –
for example
QNAP 10G port – 192.168.2.3 255.255.255.0
10G switch – 192.168.2.10
Computer 1 – 192.168.2.11
computer 2 – 192.168.2.12
computer 3 – 192.168.2.13
all MTU 9000 – on the switch, the QNAP, all computers.
you will get over 800 MB/sec on all Win 10PC’s and Thundebolt 3 Mac computers.
-
Mr. Linke probably will not want to spend $1000 for a card. I have no idea of how old this Maxx Digital EVO 8 bay is. So he is going with an ATTO R680, or an Areca ARC1883x (which as 12G connectors, and I bet it’s a 3G or 6G chassis – so he would need to try to find an old Areca ARC-1882x or ARC-188x with the proper cables). The original models use the original Areca ARC-1221, which has long been discontinued (as most of the older host cards). Don’t worry – the next question will be “isn’t there anything cheaper that I can use instead of an ATTO or Areca host adaptor” ?
Bob
-
I have no idea how someone moves from incredibly beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona to Owens Cross Roads Alabama. My bass player and his incredibly successful wife live in Isleworth, Florida (think Shaquille O’Neil and Tiger Woods, and others) and HE wants to move to be near his kids in Alabama. WHY would any human being do this ? Why would ANY human being want to abandon the professional television industry ? You know – there is only the professional entertainment industry (audio, video, music, graphics, internet, acting, dance, art) – anything else is meaningless ! All those lawyers, doctors, scientists, teachers, etc. wish they were us !
There is no “retirement” – there is only this. And then we turn into sand.
Bob Zelin
-
Mark James is your contact at OWC for questions about SoftRAID.
Bob Zelin
-
Philip – just stop this nonsense with RAID 0.
from Dec 18th 2020 –
We are releasing a M1 (Apple Silicon) version of SoftRAID today with the SoftRAID 6 beta.
We have performance optimization to work on for new volumes, but older volumes should be OK.
There are still some issues, feel free to post any differences you see, but at least you can be working with SoftRAID now.
and more –
Here is an announcement from Tim Standing, Vice President Engineering, OWC.
Many of our customers are wondering: Is SoftRAID going to work on Big Sur? Will SoftRAID continue to work on Macs with Apple silicon?
Let’s start with a little background on the team behind SoftRAID for Mac: We have already been through, not 1 but 2 processor architecture changes. First the one was from Motorola 68000 to PowerPC and the second was from PowerPC to Intel. So of course we’re going to conquer this transition as well.
We already have a Mac mini with Apple silicon on our way from Apple, we ordered it registered for one 5 minutes after the web page went live. In anticipation of the Mac mini arriving next week, we have already started implementing the changes required to support this new CPU. Just like the move from PowerPC to Intel, for this change, the majority of the code for SoftRAID will not require any changes. There are just a few key areas we will have to change.
With the switch from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, the major change was that areas of memory which stored numbers larger than 256 were set up in the reverse order in the Intel CPU. This mean that any number, that was used by the SoftRAID driver to determine what type of volume was in use, had to be swapped around right after it was read from disk and right before it was written back out.
With this new CPU, the key changes are the way the processor counts time and the way each of the CPU cores determine if memory has been altered by another CPU core. We have already finished the changes to the SoftRAID code which rely on getting time. We have also started a code review of both the driver and SoftRAID tool to determine what needs to be changed to accommodate the new multi-core CPU memory access architecture.
If you have access to a Mac mini with Apple silicon and would like to try out beta builds of SoftRAID which support this new CPU, please let us know and we will give you access to the beta testing program. Obviously, you won’t be able to use it with Thunderbolt enclosures, as these test Mac minis don’t have Thunderbolt, but you will be able to use it with USB 3.1 Gen 2 enclosures like the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad. We will be testing it with 4, 8 and 16 disk RAID volumes to ensure our implementation is robust.
I’ll post more on this thread when we have a beta ready for testing with this new Mac hardware architecture.
Tim Standing
VP Software Engineering – Mac
Other World Computing, Inc.