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32TB Raid 5 in MacPro 5,1?

Macshroomer

Macshroomer

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 6, 2009
1,307
733
Hi, been a long time, I see with no real updates to either the MacPro 6,1 or even the highest end iMac I am going to stick with my fantastic 6 x 3.46 5,1 a bit longer. I did a search but came up with vagueness so bear with me if this has been addressed elsewhere...

Right now I am running 4 x 3TB in RAID-5 via Softraid, seems to be fine except that with 9TB usable, I am getting a little pudgy around the proverbial waist, especially in shooting medium format digital in addition to hi res DSLR.

I typically mirror what ever I have in the box with an external RAID-5 config of the same capacity for double fail safe before I archive my RAW files. So I just ordered 8 x 8TB enterprise spinners to do that with, never spent that much on drives before, lol!

I know the external is good to go clear on up to 40TB with 4 slots but am I going to run into any issues with plopping 32TB ( 24TB usable space ) of drives in my current hardware? I am running 10.10.5 for a fair amount of reasons so I am trying to avoid the heck out of moving to the newer OS. Judging by what I found here, I should be fine and dandy...

Any tips, warnings or praise for 32TB in a 5,1 MacPro?
 
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Maybe archive some of your photos to a NAS instead? Keep the internal RAID for the stuff you need to work on now and then get a NAS (or build one), mount a share (SMB or NFS) and then move the suff you aren't working on to that. You could do that in Lightroom (if you are using LR) and it would still be available online, just be a bit slower to access, but you could move back a project to the internal RAID if you needed to do a lot of work on it. You could also put another network card into the Mac so you can access the NAS at 1Gb/s on a separate link to what you use for everything else.
 
Thanks for the suggestion, I thought about that. But, I am purposely using CS6 non-cloud and not LR either since I archive with Capture One Media Pro. I do have one lane open though, at least I have the drives coming...
 
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I'd test it anyway. All you need is any old computer that's capable of running Linux. The speed of a single disk is quicker than Ethernet (with modern disks anyway), and adding RAID to a NAS later will only increase capacity really. It's a concept that's worth testing as it won't cost you very much to do and you might already have the kit around to try it. You might as well know for sure before you rule it out.
 
Haha, I built a 16TB RAID and did not even think about checking the HFS+ limits.
 
I have 2 8TB HGST drives in my 5,1. I'm not using them in a RAID but have no doubt they'll work.

When WD first introduced these 8TB external drives earlier this year, they actually used the HGST helium drives. Essentially a $400 drive sold for $250 + an external enclosure. The read and write speed are around 215MB/s. They make funny noises though with the helium gas inside.
 
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