External SSD System Drive for 2017 21.5" Retina 4K iMac

[ddublu]

Sorry to hijack but I'm curious how folks would suggest replacing two OWC Thunderbays one which is 16TB and the other (the backup to the 16TB) with SSD - OR would you? They are noisy and set up on RAID 0 and just curious if SSDs would be a viable replacement here?

 

[drrich2]

just curious if SSDs would be a viable replacement here?

I imagine cost will be the key issue in whether it's viable. Do you need 16-terabytes of storage, or did you just buy a lot of extra space? How much would the SSD replacements cost you? You said your current hard disc drive-based setup is noisy, but you didn't say it was too slow.

Even if you go for SSD's that aren't especially high data transfer rate (speaking of which, just how fast do you need your main storage (not the backup) to be?), what cost are you looking at?

From a little quick Googling, I take it your 2 Thunderbays can house either HDD or SSD, so in theory it's down to the cost of the SSDs. How many drives can each of your Thunderbays hold?

You mention 2 16-TB Thunderbay setups, of which one is the backup to the other, but say they are set on RAID 0, which has no redundancy in order to focus on higher speed. Maybe it's just me, but I found that a little confusing.

 

[ddublu]

I prob have 8TB in use and could use a nice paring back for sure. My business turned 10 this year so it's pretty much everything I've shot. I use CCC to update any changes on the 16tb to the 10tb and also have Crashplan in place with every image up there as well. I dont need more space - just curious if there's a much smaller (footprint) way to setup what I've got without spending a couple thousand dollars.

And I misspoke I believe - if I recall, it's RAID 5.