External Storage Solutions for New Mac Pro

[Mago]

I personally don't like Drobo... I don't like parity RAID (especially for large media libraries where rebuild times become risky and downtime usually isn't critical) and Drobos proprietary solution even less. JBOD is perfectly fine for a media library. Did you look at the Oyen Digital Mobius I recommended? It supports SPAN arrays if your really want that, but those arrays have all the risks of RAID0 with none of the performance benefits.

Look at Raid Z2, no risk since you have a double redundant system if one drive fail rebuild it with confidence that the array is still capable to handle a 2nd drive failure while rebuilding the first downed drive.

RAID Z2 IS THE NEW STANDARD ON DATA CENTERS, builds on raid z2 require at least 4 drives, and become optimal for 7-8 drives, but is an big relief to the dual sucesive failure nightmare (it's likely you crash on a plane twice the same day)

 

[GoogleFish]

Yeah, the Mobius and some other enclosures support this idea of one large volume made up of different disks. It's generally called a spanning volume or SPAN mode, etc. The problem with it is... if one disk fails, you lose the entire contents of the volume. This is the same issue as you have when running RAID0. However with a spanning volume, you don't get any performance benefits like you do with RAID0.

My recommendation would be to avoid using a spanning volume and just organize it so your old movies are on drive B, your recent movies on drive A, and your music on drive C or whatever makes sense. That way, if one drive fails, you're only faced with loosing some of your content.

Any idea where to get one of these in Canada? Shipping is crazy expensive buying directly from them. Otherwise, is a cheaper Mediasonic USB3 4 Bay enclosure likely to work similarly?

 

[VirtualRain]

Any idea where to get one of these in Canada? Shipping is crazy expensive buying directly from them. Otherwise, is a cheaper Mediasonic USB3 4 Bay enclosure likely to work similarly?

I'm afraid not. I don't own one, but whenever I need something from the US and the shipping is prohibitive, I have it sent to my border postal outlet or our US office and have it forwarded.

 

[matreya]

Otherwise, is a cheaper Mediasonic USB3 4 Bay enclosure likely to work similarly?

I had one of those enclosures, but I had issues with it randomly unmounting disks around about the time I updated to 10.8.5 (now running 10.9.2), so I replaced it with an OWC Elite Pro Qx2 operating in JBOD mode.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/M3QX2KIT0GB/

 

[Stephen0523]

Thunderbolt

I am in the same boat and found these very reasonable price.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/External-Drive/OWC/ThunderBay-4-mini