3.5" HD Thunderbolt RAID external enclosure recommendations

[OSXconvert]

I'm hoping to buy a new desktop Mac soon for my photo processing (Lightroom, Photoshop) and am seeking recommendations for a 4-6 drive thunderbolt enclosure for backups and archiving. I'd like to get a new Mac Pro, but I have a feeling it will be too expensive and delayed until the fall, ditto for the Mac Studio 2.0, so I will probably just get the latest Mac Mini with M2Pro chip and use it for a year until new chips and imaging software makes another upgrade compelling. Currently I have a Firmtek eSATA 4-drive enclosure with 2 pairs of mirrored 3.5in drives attached by 4 eSATA cables to an i9 hackpro running Big Sur. It seems the days of external SATA are over.

Which enclosures would you recommend? Since I will have 4 TB4 ports on an M2Pro Mini, how many will I need to use on a 4-6 drive enclosure? Since I'll be using 3.5inch 4-8TB hard drives, I doubt even TB2 bandwidth would get saturated. I was thinking that if I got a 6 drive enclosure I could set up 3 RAID 1 pairs or 2 RAID1 pairs and the extra slots for other backups/cloning. (Can you even use Carbon Copy Cloner to boot from an external enclosure attached via TB?)

Finally, since I'm using Intel and Big Sur, my mirrored drive pairs were created in Disk Utility, but I'm wondering if I can recreate this in Ventura's Disk Utility, or would I have to buy a product like Soft Raid to create RAID1 sets? And if Ventura's Disk Utility allows the creation of RAID1 pairs, could I just take my drive pairs and pop them in the new box and be able to continue using them as is? I bet I'd have to copy all the data to manually to a new set of drives in the enclosure, right?

Thanks for your help.

 

[yezza]

I was after a four bay enclosure to pair with my M2 Pro Mac Mini for backup tasks, and ended up going for the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad (I’m yet to receive it).

You can get their raid software, someone else’s, or none.

It could be worth considering:

OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad RAID Ready (JBOD) 4-Bay Storage Enclosure https://a.co/d/d3g7crC

 

[OSXconvert]

I was after a four bay enclosure to pair with my M2 Pro Mac Mini for backup tasks, and ended up going for the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad (I’m yet to receive it).

You can get their raid software, someone else’s, or none.

It could be worth considering:

OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad RAID Ready (JBOD) 4-Bay Storage Enclosure https://a.co/d/d3g7crC

@yezza thanks for your advice. It seems that your OWC is a previous version, certainly affordable. The newer version is faster and allows daisy chaining and monitor setup:

OWC ThunderBay 4: Thunderbolt 4-Bay External RAID Storage

The ultimate Thunderbolt RAID Storage Drive for creative workflows. Perfect for handling 4K video, audio, and photography with confidence and speed.

eshop.macsales.com

But your cheaper version has basically the same functionality as my eSATA version has and probably similar speed over USB 3.2, so for archiving, there is little advantage except for daisy-chaining with the latest Thunderbay version.

Please come back here with your review once you get it set up. Will you be using DU or Softraid? I'm hoping I can keep on using DU and my current 2 sets of RAID1 pairs that I've been using in Big Sur can just be put into the new enclosure and be ready without issue on Ventura.

 

[yezza]

Yes I should have mentioned that I was looking for something “affordable”, especially after laying a ton of cash on my new Mac Mini.

I was considering brands such as Orico and Yottamaster, but decided to go one step up with the OWC unit.

I will just be using a single 8TB drive for my Time Machine backups, and the other 3 bays will be filled with drives from my 2008 Mac Pro. One of the drives will be for my wife’s MacBook Time Machine backups. So I won’t be raiding any drives. I think that the enclosure I’ve purchased doesn’t come with OWC’s Softraid. I would consider using DU if I was going to set up any raid, but would need to do further research.

Anyway, the OWC unit fits my requirements well. Speed is plenty fast enough (faster than the Orico and Yottamaster and similar low price enclosures from memory). Sure it would have been nice to be able to daisy chain, but I’ll get by.

Will let you know how it pans out.

 

[OSXconvert]

Yes I should have mentioned that I was looking for something “affordable”, especially after laying a ton of cash on my new Mac Mini.

I was considering brands such as Orico and Yottamaster, but decided to go one step up with the OWC unit.

I will just be using a single 8TB drive for my Time Machine backups, and the other 3 bays will be filled with drives from my 2008 Mac Pro. One of the drives will be for my wife’s MacBook Time Machine backups. So I won’t be raiding any drives. I think that the enclosure I’ve purchased doesn’t come with OWC’s Softraid. I would consider using DU if I was going to set up any raid, but would need to do further research.

Anyway, the OWC unit fits my requirements well. Speed is plenty fast enough (faster than the Orico and Yottamaster and similar low price enclosures from memory). Sure it would have been nice to be able to daisy chain, but I’ll get by.

Will let you know how it pans out.

Thanks for your info, @yezza. Do you have BlackMagic disk speed tester?

‎Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

‎Disk Speed Test is an easy to use tool to quickly measure and certify your disk performance for working with high quality video! Simply click the start button and Disk Speed Test will write test your disk using large blocks of data, and then display the result. Disk Speed Test will continue to...

apps.apple.com

I'd love to know your speeds with your OWC boxt to any of your drives. My RAID1 pairs of cheap Seagate Barracuda 4TB drives are delivering 112MB/s write and 117MB/s read from my Firmtek 4-bay box via eSATA to a SATA card in my HackPro. Pretty slow, but wanted to see if I'm using USB3.1 or 3.2 on a new mini if I'd get faster speeds--speed is drive limited in this case and probably not caused by the box or bus.

 

[OSXconvert]

Thanks for your info, @yezza. Do you have BlackMagic disk speed tester?

‎Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

‎Disk Speed Test is an easy to use tool to quickly measure and certify your disk performance for working with high quality video! Simply click the start button and Disk Speed Test will write test your disk using large blocks of data, and then display the result. Disk Speed Test will continue to...

apps.apple.com

I'd love to know your speeds with your OWC boxt to any of your drives. My RAID1 pairs of cheap Seagate Barracuda 4TB drives are delivering 112MB/s write and 117MB/s read from my Firmtek 4-bay box via eSATA to a SATA card in my HackPro. Pretty slow, but wanted to see if I'm using USB3.1 or 3.2 on a new mini if I'd get faster speeds--speed is drive limited in this case and probably not caused by the box or bus.

Since I bought the OWC Mercury Elite unit, I tested the speeds via Thunderbolt 4 hub's USBC 10gbps port with RAID1 pairs of Sata 6 HDDs and I get about 230Mb/s Write and 215Mb/s Read on Iron Wolfs and a little better than the eSATA speeds on my HackPro with the Barracuda 4TB RAID1 pairs of 135Mb/s Write and 135Mb/s Read. This is fine for my time machine and archive backups.

 

[yezza]

@OSXconvert my Mercury Elite Pro finally arrived, and I got it up and running only yesterday. It's plugged into a USB-C port on my Mac Mini M2 Pro.

Current drives installed, all formatted APFS:

1. A brand new Seagate Ironwolf 8TB NAS drive ~230MB/s read/write;
2. An older 2TB drive ~131MB/s read / 118MB/s write;
3. An older 1TB drive ~115MB/s read/write.

I also have a Samsung 860 EVO 2TB SSD to throw in there once I've decommissioned my old 3,1 Mac Pro - I'm interested to see how that performs in the OWC enclosure.

Unfortunately I forgot to get a screenshot of the 8TB speed test before I set it up as my Time Machine disk, so I no longer have write access to do another test.