Are 3rd Party External Enclosures as Reliable as Internal SATA2 Bays?

[cinealta]

I am in complete awe of ZFS and am saddened that Apple couldn't implement it.

Could be a licensing issue with Sun.

 

[motegi]

Lucky you. I had four drives fail, the chipset seems to be the weak spot, unless its the power adapter. Either way, the hard drive still works in another case, so I won't buy lacie.

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One notable difference between the cheap ones and LaCie drives. While LaCie look pretty, the ones that I had didn't have fans

Ah. Having only used the 4BIG units (with fans) maybe I am a special case.

 

[motegi]

Could be a licensing issue with Sun.

I thought ZFS was open source?

 

[AidenShaw]

I'm always right. It's just a matter of redefining the problem. 😀

This one should get integer overflow on the up-vote counter, just due to its honesty.

 

[cinealta]

I thought ZFS was open source?

Complicated. AFAIK, the project to port ZFS to OSX was open source but with some licensing component from Sun. Then Oracle acquired Sun. IIRC this has been in limbo since 2007 or so.

 

[AidenShaw]

Great, thanks for the detailed suggestion. So you are advocating mirroring + Time Machine backups (2 backups)?...

I keep six copies (counting redundant volumes as 2) for anything that's not quickly recreatable:

• (2) original on hardware RAID 5
• (2) Twice daily incrementals on RAID 5 (Time Machine like from WHS)
• (1) Latest off-site backup
• (1) Previous off-site backup

I also make lots of ad hoc backups, such as making a copy of a project tree named "<project>-2013.12.17" before opening <project> to make changes.

 

[marstan]

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I have to admit, I know nothing about ZFS... it sounds interesting.

Start here - by the inventors of ZFS:

http://wiki.illumos.org/download/attachments/1146951/zfs_last.pdf

 

[motegi]

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Start here - by the inventors of ZFS:

http://wiki.illumos.org/download/attachments/1146951/zfs_last.pdf‎

That link is broken. Got a fix?

 

[marstan]

That link is broken. Got a fix?

Try it again. I fixed it.

 

[davidb367]

Link to Google Port for OS X

http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/

I was intrigued by some of the previous posts. I found a port that might work. I have not loaded or used it.

 

[cinealta]

Although I never had any mechanical problems with external LaCie 7200 firewire drives, they kept spinning down at idle in some kind of energy saving mode. Then they would take about 5 secs to spin back up. Not good if you hit "record" & there's a lag.