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Economical NAS & DAS with thunderbolt 2

If you have an iMac (stationary computer) why not just attach usb3 disks? They come cheap and have large capacity. You can share these out over the network directly from your iMac. Your mac can act as an NFS share to other devices on the network.

As you have a stationary computer I think this is really the best solution.
 
They are indeed cheap; you sacrifice reliability and convenience (several logical--and physical drives--versus a RAID array of several physical drives that appears as one logical volume). Indeed, you lose redundancy as well, but remember, redundancy != backups. Finally, speed, even when using regular plattered disks.\ is lost with USB3 external drives. If you are going to go that route, at least buy your own external enclosure and put in a WD Red drive yourself.
 
Maybe you missed the modifier.

I always love how some random person who reads an entire thread of text picks up one aside and complains about it.

In consumer electronics, a DAS is almost exclusively used in the context of Macs. Since this is a consumer website, my comments are (ready for it) *largely* appropriate.
 
cmm said:
If you're gonna do a DAS you might as well do iSCSI rather than NFSv4, etc. But honestly, don't think too much about the DAS vs NAS terminology, DAS is a largely made up Mac term.

arbitrage, happy to help out if you can draw a diagram of your current setup and your ideal setup, and also your budget (I can look at it from a USD standpoint, being in Canada may change availability and pricing).

Best-
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Currently I mainly am using my 15rMBP to edit in LR with. I use a Seagate portable 2TB drive to store my RAW files and backup of LR catalogue file. I have 2 identical Seagate drives that I clone the main one to and take on of those to work. These are USB 3 drives.

The big change is I ordered a new 5K iMac to replace my slow 2009 iMac with a spinning HD that I can't stand anymore. I want to go back to using the iMac in my home office most of the time and still use my 15rMBP on the living room couch some of the time.

My original thought was a NAS connected to the iMac that would hold a Clone of the iMac SSD and would hold all of my RAW files. I would then need 2 backup drives to clone the RAW files to as I do now with the portable seagate drives. I then thought that I may be able to manage without the NAS as I can use Lightroom Smart Previews on the rMBP to edit and cull images without needing access to the actual RAW files. That would mean I'm just looking for a direct attached storage option to sit on the desk behind the iMac and then more drives to clone the RAW files over to (one to take to work for off-site safety).

I could just use USB 3 external desktop or even continue with my small laptop Seagate drives. I thought having a RAID 5 system would increase speed accessing the RAW files from the iMac and give redundancy. If I have RAID 5 redundancy could I then eliminate one of my clones (the on-site clone) and just do a single clone to the off-site one once a week?? Or is that not a good idea?? Otherwise RAID 5 maybe doesn't make any sense and I can just do RAID 0 for speed and continue with 2 clones??

I would appreciate any and all ideas...
 
First and foremost, do you have a budget and if so, secondly: if you are married, have you considered the WAF (wife approval factor) when considering the budget?

To recap: Your main concern is RAW photo files? What about your lightroom library (or whatever), do you want that on the boot disk or do you want on another physical volume of some sort? Any other files we need to consider?

Will you be the only person accessing the files at once, or do you want multiple host computers (in laymen's terms, people) to be able to access the external storage (whether it's USB drives, RAID array, etc) at the same time?

thanks
 
How large is your Lightroom library currently? What kind of increase are you expecting on a yearly basis?

How large are your RAW files on the externals taking up?

Do you have any offsite backups?

I don't know what LR Smart Previews are but I have an idea; I'll look it up.

Are you comfortable with command line at all?
 
cmm said:
How large is your Lightroom library currently? What kind of increase are you expecting on a yearly basis?

How large are your RAW files on the externals taking up?

Do you have any offsite backups?

I don't know what LR Smart Previews are but I have an idea; I'll look it up.

Are you comfortable with command line at all?
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Budget is not a concern really but I don't want to go crazy. I will spend 1-2K to get a lot of future proofing on overdoing my storage. My common-law partner is not a concern either for this.

LR library is stored on my internal SSD and I plan to transfer it back and forth from iMac to rMBP with a USB3 stick with SSD controller so it will be fairly fast.

Other than my RAW files, I will store my iTunes library and about 1TB of movies/video files that I own and I will want to use the space to have clones/backups of my 3 computers (iMac (512GB), 12"rMB (512GB) and 15rMBP (512GB)).

My offsite backups now is taking my USB3 drives and keeping them at work. We have internet caps and no way to get unlimited bandwidth (I have 300GB/month and use it mostly with Netflix so can't use an internet upload).

I will be the only person accessing the files and only from one computer at a time.

My LR Cataloge is ~ 1GB and my Preview file is ~90GB. Smart Previews allow you to edit and even export up to a certain size jpeg without having the RAW files attached.

My RAW files are currently at 4TB and growing much faster than previously which could be about 1TB/yr.

I'm not really comfortable with Command Line...well I have typed in certain commands in the past that I've read online but don't really use it.

Hope that answers most or all of the questions. Really appreciate any help you can provide.

Currently I'm looking at OWC Thunderbay 4 RAID with about 12TB and then deciding whether to run RAID 5 or RAID 0+1 or something else and maybe even another Thunderbay for cloning to. I think if I have that at home I can use up all my USB3 portable Seagate drives as off-site backups. I have a lot of 1TB one and now four 2TB ones.
 
Hey, arbitrage, sorry for the delay...I'll get to this within 30 hours. Do you only want a device you buy like from brands like OWC, Synology, drobo, etc, or are you open to building your own server?

Do you have other file concerns besides these photos (e.g., bluray rips etc)? If your RAWs are 4TB but your working data is only ~100gb, just get an SSD connected TB2 and put the RAWs on regular disks in some JBOD or simple RAID array.

Most people think you can get an SSD and connect it via USB3 and you're set but you will lose speed. A lot of it. Most people need an SSD solution and a regular HDD solution.

I promise to write more and come up with some possible solutions within the next 30 hours but if you can answer that, that would be great.
 
cmm said:
Hey, arbitrage, sorry for the delay...I'll get to this within 30 hours. Do you only want a device you buy like from brands like OWC, Synology, drobo, etc, or are you open to building your own server?

Do you have other file concerns besides these photos (e.g., bluray rips etc)? If your RAWs are 4TB but your working data is only ~100gb, just get an SSD connected TB2 and put the RAWs on regular disks in some JBOD or simple RAID array.

Most people think you can get an SSD and connect it via USB3 and you're set but you will lose speed. A lot of it. Most people need an SSD solution and a regular HDD solution.

I promise to write more and come up with some possible solutions within the next 30 hours but if you can answer that, that would be great.
Click to expand...

Thanks for stopping back in Cmm. I think I will stick to a brand name device for now...I'm looking most closely at a ThunderBay 4 RAID and now thinking of running that in RAID 10 or RAID 5. Looking at 4TB or 5TB drives that would give me 8TB or 10TB in RAID 10 OR 12TB or 16TB in RAID 5. Then another backup attached to that that could be a 2 drive TB with say RAID 0 8TB (2x4TB drives). I will probably use all my current Seagate USB3 drives for off-site backups.

I realize I don't need TB and I don't really need RAID but just want a more simplified setup instead of having so many 1 or 2TB portable drives laying around everywhere. I figured if I go 8TB that will last another 3 years or more of RAW files.

Other than the photos the rest is stuff I won't access often like backup of iTunes songs, movies and backups(clones) of the iMac, rMB and rMBP internal drives.

The RAW files will be accessed frequently but as you mention only the latest 200-300GBs from the last month or so. The older ones will only be accessed occasionally.
 
arbitrage said:
I'm looking most closely at a ThunderBay 4 RAID and now thinking of running that in RAID 10 or RAID 5
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I have one of these G-Tech G-SPEED STUDIO enclosures from OWC, which I populated with 4 x 3TB HGST Deskstar NAS drives and it works brilliantly. My only concern with using SoftRAID with the Thunderbay 4 is relying on the SoftRAID drivers not breaking every time there's a major release of OS X.
 
arbitrage, how much space does your movies take up now and will that change much in the future? For me, I have 8tb of bluray rips so I have a NAS specifically for bluray and TV media files. Is that something you see that could happen? If so, I would recommend highly that you split the NAS in two physical boxes (and two logical drives): One SSD array and one WD RED disk array. Let me know! I'll find you the right solution! :) I am a bit hesitant on OWC, honestly.
 
Why on God's green earth would you setup an SSD array as a NAS? You could push enough data to flood a network connection with just an HDD array in RAID5..

Also, I would recommend HGST Deskstar NAS drives over WD Reds, any day of the week.

And what exactly is wrong with OWC?
 
I don't use the word DAS. The SSD NAS would be connected via TB2, as I describe (and argue for) above. You are right, most people don't understand that you won't get actual SSD speeds unless you connect to something with more bandwidth than gigabit, so people waste a lot of money so it is worth bringing up again.
 
cmm said:
arbitrage, how much space does your movies take up now and will that change much in the future? For me, I have 8tb of bluray rips so I have a NAS specifically for bluray and TV media files. Is that something you see that could happen? If so, I would recommend highly that you split the NAS in two physical boxes (and two logical drives): One SSD array and one WD RED disk array. Let me know! I'll find you the right solution! :) I am a bit hesitant on OWC, honestly.
Click to expand...

Movie disk space won't increase by much. I'm not ripping things very often. The only thing that will grow significantly will be my RAW files and about 1TB per year I predict unless I get better at culling them....:)
 
arbitrage said:
Movie disk space won't increase by much. I'm not ripping things very often. The only thing that will grow significantly will be my RAW files and about 1TB per year I predict unless I get better at culling them....:)
Click to expand...
Okay and is backups over time machine at all important for you via your NAS? Afp is being phased out in 10.11 from what I recall so if it's really important then we need to find a device that still supports it for now (but I'd focus on using another backup option...I have my preferences we can discuss once we get you the right NAS. I just wanted to make sure the NAS does not have to support time machine backups.
 
OllyW said:
It wouldn't be a NAS then as it's an acronym for Network-Attached Storage.
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The devices the OP is asking about use a LAN configured over Thunderbolt, so yes, they are NAS devices. This gets you speed without having to buy 10GbE devices and allows the connection of other devices to the storage without having to file share through the machine connected to the storage by Thunderbolt.
 
Weaselboy said:
Interesting... thanks for that. Now here we are over two years later still on AFP for Time Machine though. I wonder what the holdup is.
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It is low on the priority list and Apple has made some serious changes, viz pivots into new areas the past two years. Not to mention, changing a filesystem that is legacy to something more modern is VERY labor intensive and it isn't a graceful change.

But the point is, apple wants to end afp and time machine is fraught with problems. Honestly, Apple is probably working on a replacement for Time Machine at this point that is built on NFSv4 rather than take out afp protocol and replace only that protocol with Time Machine as we know it.

Frankly, this is how I keep synced. It isn't sexy but it damn well works. Thought about Git but Mercurial for this application, coupled with Unison, is brilliant!

https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ beats rsync and lets me sync between computers and do backups onsite and offiste
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/about

I also use http://rsnapshot.org for periodic snapshots to USB drives that go off-site.

Hope that helps!

arbitrage, a solution is forthcoming, sorry I was exhausted yesterday more so than I thought!
 
cmm said:
but remember, redundancy != backups.
Click to expand...

100% true.

That being said, during all the time I have had a NAS with redundancy (over a decade), I have not needed any backups of the NASes nor have I lost any data. This includes the time when we were hit by Hurricane Sandy and lost power for over a week. Throughout all this time, redundancy to protect against failed drives have been sufficient.
 
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