External TB HD Arrays - Promise Pegasus2 R6, Areca ARC-8050T2 , or OWC ThunderBay 4

[dpavid]

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/

Just ordered a nMP and need TB storage solutions for video editing. 12TB is sufficient for my needs. Right now we're working off 6TB and mange just fine. Our typical workflow is to ingest all the footage onto the RAID, edit, and upon completion or delivery, we use Media Manager to consolidate and move the project to another single external drive and delete all the unused media. This frees up the RAID for more storage.

That being said, I'm heavily leaning toward ThunderBay4 for performance and price. I could buy two of these and have them mirror each other for a much cheaper price point than one of the other two options.

Any others to consider?

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TBIVT12.0S/

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Promise%20Technology/P2R6HD12US/

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Areca/ARC8050T2/

 

[maflynn]

I think Pegasus is the high end (and highly priced) model but the others are decent. If you go with the Thunderbay, please followup with some benchmarks, I'm curious to know how fast this is.

One thing I noticed in my Drobo is that I got fantastic speeds when I first set it up, i.e., empty drive but over the course of time its slowed down a lot so I'm looking for another solution.

 

[dpavid]

I think Pegasus is the high end (and highly priced) model but the others are decent. If you go with the Thunderbay, please followup with some benchmarks, I'm curious to know how fast this is.

One thing I noticed in my Drobo is that I got fantastic speeds when I first set it up, i.e., empty drive but over the course of time its slowed down a lot so I'm looking for another solution.

According to their website... It's faster than the R6. The R6 is RAID5 though and the ThunderBay 4 is RAID0 so not an even comparison but still, that's pretty fast.

 

[matreya]

That being said, I'm heavily leaning toward ThunderBay4 for performance and price. I could buy two of these and have them mirror each other for a much cheaper price point than one of the other two options.

I've had the Thunderbay IV for 10 days thus far, and have it configured with 4 x 2TB Toshiba hard drives, and have to say I'm very impressed with the speed (over 700MB/sec read/write)

 

[chrisn123]

I have the Areca 8050T2 and really like it. Raid5 performance (with 8 slow NAS drives) is about 1000MB/Sec.

For your specific need, however, I agree that the ThunderBay seems a reasonable solution. This is especially true if your workflow is such that a failure of the array isn't a huge deal for you (because you are only staging media that you have stored elsewhere).

If, OTOH, you want to have the option to work with bigger (or multiple) projects AND get more speed AND have fault tolerance, I would go with an 8-bay with hardware RAID controller versus two 4-bay boxes.

Finally, with 8 bays you can use slower/cheaper/quieter/cooler/smaller drives AND get more speed versus 4-bays where you may be tempted to put in faster and more expensive drives to hit your target capacity and performance.....

 

[dpavid]

I have the Areca 8050T2 and really like it. Raid5 performance (with 8 slow NAS drives) is about 1000MB/Sec.

For your specific need, however, I agree that the ThunderBay seems a reasonable solution. This is especially true if your workflow is such that a failure of the array isn't a huge deal for you (because you are only staging media that you have stored elsewhere).

If, OTOH, you want to have the option to work with bigger (or multiple) projects AND get more speed AND have fault tolerance, I would go with an 8-bay with hardware RAID controller versus two 4-bay boxes.

Finally, with 8 bays you can use slower/cheaper/quieter/cooler/smaller drives AND get more speed versus 4-bays where you may be tempted to put in faster and more expensive drives to hit your target capacity and performance.....

What drives are you using with your Areca 8050T2?

 

[chrisn123]

What drives are you using with your Areca 8050T2?

I use 4TB Seagate NAS drives (ST4000VN000-1H4168). In RAID0, eight of these (new/empty) almost saturate TB2 (about 1250MB/Sec). In RAID5 at 50% full, I still get 950-1000MB/Sec which is basically same speed as internal SSD for everything other than very small random reads.

Best bang for buck is prob 3TB desktop drives.

 

[matreya]

I use 4TB Seagate NAS drives (ST4000VN000-1H4168). In RAID0, eight of these (new/empty) almost saturate TB2 (about 1250MB/Sec). In RAID5 at 50% full, I still get 950-1000MB/Sec which is basically same speed as internal SSD for everything other than very small random reads.

Best bang for buck is prob 3TB desktop drives.

Another drive worth considering (I have 4 x 3TB units in a RAID 5 Qx2 enclosure) are the HGST Deskstar NAS drives:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...ATCH&Description=deskstar+nas&N=-1&isNodeId=1

 

[dpavid]

Thanks for the updates. It seems like NAS drives are the way to go in the Areca RAID and not consumer HD's. I read some reviews on various NAS drives this is what people are saying.

"If you're using regular consumer drives in a large array, there are some very simple (and likely) scenarios that can cause it to completely fail."

"The solution should be simple - just get some drives with TLER. The problem is that until now those were prohibitively expensive. Enterprise drives have all sorts of added features like accelerometers and pressure sensors to compensate for sliding in and out of a server rack while operating, as well as dealing with rapid pressure changes that take place when the server room door opens and the forced air circulation takes a quick detour. Those features just aren't needed in that home NAS sitting on your bookshelf. What *is* needed is a WD Caviar Green that has TLER, and Western Digital delivers that in their new Red drives."

This drive is rated pretty high. Anybody have reservations about these in a Areca RAID setup vs. HGST or Seagate?

WD Red 3 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD30EFRX

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I guess this article sums it up.

http://www.custompcreview.com/articles/guides/selecting-best-hard-drive-network-attached-storage-nas/19177/

 

[MaxMartini]

I finally got my Thunderbay4 (the thunderbolt 2 version) from OWC assembled and tested so far so good. I was able to get my hands on the beta softraid 5 software and have had some good results with that as well. I put 4 512GB Crucial MX100 drives in the enclosure and am currently running it in softraid 5 and end up with 1.53TB of space. I am seeing around 600MB/s write and 920.8MB/s read in this configuration. (I can post some screen shots if interested)

 

[cube]

There's also an Onnto DataTale, which has management software.

I have no experience with Netstor.

Why buy WD Red drives smaller than 5TB when you can buy DeskStar NAS drives upto 4TB?