Best most recent desktop storage 10TB+ externals?

Surfsuprob · Sep 20, 2016

I've been looking at the Lacie & G-tech 8-10 TB External drives which are 4-5 bays but noticed their from 2014 and wondering if there is anything newer you guys recommend?

There will be 2 other computers in the office connecting to this drive along with myself, having it attached to my iMac.
Looking to put tons of 1080p and new 4K footage on it, have a RAID-5 (most likely?) and somehow have that backed up.

What do you all recommend?

matreya · Sep 20, 2016

One of these:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Areca/ARC5026/

Populated with HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB drives to give you a RAID6 capacity of 8TB. If you need more space, then get 6TB Deskstar NAS drives.

kryten42 · Sep 21, 2016

Surfsuprob said:
I've been looking at the Lacie & G-tech 8-10 TB External drives which are 4-5 bays but noticed their from 2014 and wondering if there is anything newer you guys recommend?

There will be 2 other computers in the office connecting to this drive along with myself, having it attached to my iMac.
Looking to put tons of 1080p and new 4K footage on it, have a RAID-5 (most likely?) and somehow have that backed up.

What do you all recommend?

Why not get a NAS? If multiple systems connecting then a good GigE NAS with 4-5 drives is best for multi user performance. Synology always gets my vote there. Far more useful than attached to one computer and then shared.

Also if backups are really important the Synology has multiple options:

NAS to NAS Copy - Just buy two and mirror them
NAS to offsite - Amazon S3, Amazon Prime, Amazon Glacier, Dropbox, etc. etc.

Surfsuprob · Sep 21, 2016

kryten42 said:
Why not get a NAS? If multiple systems connecting then a good GigE NAS with 4-5 drives is best for multi user performance. Synology always gets my vote there. Far more useful than attached to one computer and then shared.

Also if backups are really important the Synology has multiple options:

NAS to NAS Copy - Just buy two and mirror them
NAS to offsite - Amazon S3, Amazon Prime, Amazon Glacier, Dropbox, etc. etc.

I just didn't think NAS setups are fast enough for doing video editing?

kryten42 · Sep 21, 2016

You can put a SSD cache on them if needed. But is it only the one system doing the editing or are they all? If they all are then I do not think your setup of direct attached to 1 system and shared to the others will help. The one that is direct attached will be fast, but the others are going to be limited by the network still. A good NAS can have a lot of IOPS, choices of protocols, bonded networking etc all to get peak performance.

Not done any real video editing myself, but take a look at https://www.synology.com/en-us/solution/videography

danielwsmithee · Sep 21, 2016

I love Synology NAS as well but I wouldn't recommend them for video editing work. In order to get a Synology NAS capable of that it will take a significant investment into 10GbE interfaces and switches. If the OP is starting his search with Lacie & G-Tech, I don't think that is really what he had in mind...

You may want to consider going with something simpler ....

An OWC Thunderbay 4 directly attached to your main video editing workstation (iMac) and much cheaper/slower NAS for backups...

Do those other machines need very fast access to the video footage attached to the iMac? Or do they copy it over slowly and then work on it locally?

Surfsuprob · Sep 21, 2016

danielwsmithee said:
I love Synology NAS as well but I wouldn't recommend them for video editing work. In order to get a Synology NAS capable of that it will take a significant investment into 10GbE interfaces and switches. If the OP is starting his search with Lacie & G-Tech, I don't think that is really what he had in mind...

You may want to consider going with something simpler ....

An OWC Thunderbay 4 directly attached to your main video editing workstation (iMac) and much cheaper/slower NAS for backups...

Do those other machines need very fast access to the video footage attached to the iMac? Or do they copy it over slowly and then work on it locally?

We work a lot locally then want to copy it over to the storage - I would be the only one working on projects with the files directly on the storage and a massive iphoto library (or a couple)

The other 2 people would just be moving files directly to the storage, not really working off of it. But if they need some files they would need access to it if needed at times.

Lacie is out of the question for now, I did check out the OSW but I also saw that G-Tech has their G-Speed Studio Raid Thunderbolt 2 12TB - 4 Bay from $1999 discounted to $899! But again, I want something that will last us many years to backup all our work and access it when we need to.

danielwsmithee · Sep 21, 2016

Surfsuprob said:
We work a lot locally then want to copy it over to the storage - I would be the only one working on projects with the files directly on the storage and a massive iphoto library (or a couple)

The other 2 people would just be moving files directly to the storage, not really working off of it. But if they need some files they would need access to it if needed at times.

Lacie is out of the question for now, I did check out the OSW but I also saw that G-Tech has their G-Speed Studio Raid Thunderbolt 2 12TB - 4 Bay from $1999 discounted to $899! But again, I want something that will last us many years to backup all our work and access it when we need to.

I don't have any experience with Lacie or G-Tech so I can't comment on their products very much. I would suggest getting a 4-bay unit as that provides better options for expansion and raid options.

You also need to decide is this going to be used for active work, or for backups. That will change how you want it configured raid-0 vs 1 vs 5 etc, and your backups should be on a separate unit.

If it were me I'd want two units. One large Raid-5 or Raid-1 drive for backups (NAS for example).

A separate high speed unit for active work. Some people are taking OWC Thuderbay 4 (mini) and installing SSDs + HDs and creating large external fusion drives for this, or just going all SSDs.

Surfsuprob · Sep 24, 2016

Ive been now looking at the Drobo 5dt and Qnap bays but man qnap is super expensive

danielwsmithee · Sep 24, 2016

Surfsuprob said:
Ive been now looking at the Drobo 5dt and Qnap bays but man qnap is super expensive

I'm a big fan of Synology, they have great Mac support. I've heard Drobo does too.

cube · Sep 24, 2016

You can just buy a single 10TB drive now.

tuffdog · Sep 24, 2016

cube · Sep 25, 2016

There is a consumer 4TB SSD already, but it is too expensive.

FireWire2 · Oct 3, 2016

Surfsuprob said:
I've been looking at the Lacie & G-tech 8-10 TB External drives which are 4-5 bays but noticed their from 2014 and wondering if there is anything newer you guys recommend?

There will be 2 other computers in the office connecting to this drive along with myself, having it attached to my iMac.
Looking to put tons of 1080p and new 4K footage on it, have a RAID-5 (most likely?) and somehow have that backed up.

What do you all recommend?

I would get a five bay eSATA/USB3.0 stand-alone RAID
http://www.datoptic.com/ec/esata-usb3-0-hardware-raid-support-mac-windows-freebsd-linux.html
with 6TB HDD you would have a 24TB usable RAID5, if you ever want it to be thunderbolt the get
https://www.amazon.com/Sonnet-USB-eSATA-Thunderbolt-Adapter/dp/B00TYF2AFA/

Now you can use TB /eSATA / USB3.0
To back up get this USB3.0 JBoD
http://www.datoptic.com/ec/quad-4-sataiii-to-usb3-0-support-uasp-for-mac-windwows-linux.html

Do back up in there - quiet, fast and effective

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Best most recent desktop storage 10TB+ externals?

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