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External Thunderbolt 2.0 chassis Recommendations

theSeb said:
If you're using mechanical hard drives, then it is impossible to be getting random I/O speeds anywhere near that of an SSD. It does not matter what RAID level you use. It is simply impossible. I think you meant sequential transfer speeds?
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Umm. OK. Have a look. Keep in mind that I have 8 spindles with a boat load of cache and advanced command ordering, so the drive heads in modern arrays aren't really doing "random" physical seeks.

But, hey, I was surprised too, to be honest. Is QuickBench not the best tool to test with?

Edit: I noticed that QuickBench is from 2008, so maybe not reliable. Ideas for better testing? Seems wicked fast doing finder copying, but maybe OS is smart enough to "read ahead" or whatever such that even a ton of small files goes fast?

Screen%20Shot%202014-03-12%20at%202.17.31%20PM.png


Screen%20Shot%202014-03-12%20at%202.16.41%20PM.png
 
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It's the cache confusing simplistic benchmarks

theSeb said:
Ok, that has me stumped.
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My current "standard" storage building block for my servers has 8 GiB of dynamically adapting write-back cache, and eight 16 Gbps FibreChannel connections (which can be configured as eight parallel connections for bandwidth or four failover pairs for redundancy). The block has from 25 to almost 200 6/12 Gbps SAS disks.

Simple synthetic benchmarks tend to run entirely out of cache at the speed of the (multiple) FC links.

When I want to get numbers, I'll use (or write) a benchmark that runs for hours on datasets of 100 GB to 200 GB (at least 10 to 20 times the size of the cache).

No "benchmark" that runs for a minute or two can really measure the performance of a modern external array controller.
 
AidenShaw said:
When I want to get numbers, I'll use (or write) a benchmark that runs for hours on datasets of 100 GB to 200 GB (at least 10 to 20 times the size of the cache).

No "benchmark" that runs for a minute or two can really measure the performance of a modern external array controller.
Click to expand...

FYI (and in that regard), I did some tests with finder copies using a 25GB iPhoto library (thousands of small / medium files) copying from SSD to array and back, then doing an in-place "duplicate" in Finder. Notwithstanding my benchmarks, the in-place dupe took about twice as long (4:55 versus 2:16) on the array. But, in fairness, I think that is kind of a worst-case scenario for a physical drive.

Weirdly, the copy from SSD to Array took 3:28, and the return copy only 1:44. Not sure what to conclude from that.
 
bedifferent said:
My Mac Pro went from ~2 weeks to just shipped, arriving tomorrow. Caught off guard, I haven't had much time to research Thunderbolt chassis' for the 4x HDD's in my current Mac Pro5,1.

From what I know, the Promise Pegasus2 seems the most recommended. I've been told by Apple you shouldn't use the HDD's in your current setup (not sure what brand ships with them). Any other recommendations? Do external Thunderbolt chassis' come with mixed media, for example holding my HDD's and internal LG Blu-Ray burner?

Thanks for any help! :)

Update: Came upon OWC's "ThunderBay IV". Using an OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD as my main boot and other products, they seem very reliable. $494.99 for a 4 bay that can use your own drives seems pretty darn good. Thoughts?

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/External-Drive/OWC/ThunderBay-IV
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Here is the latest Tbolt2
Tower
http://www.datoptic.com/ec/thunderbolt2-20gb-twelve-6gb-bay-hardware-raid5-6-quiet-tower.html

Rackmount
http://www.datoptic.com/ec/thunderb...ata-6gb-s-hardware-raid5-6-rail-included.html
 
Those numbers are nothing to sneeze at, although not quite linearly scaled up from what I was getting with my 8-bay Areca box in RAID5 with empty drives.
 
chrisn123 said:
Those numbers are nothing to sneeze at, although not quite linearly scaled up from what I was getting with my 8-bay Areca box in RAID5 with empty drives.
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I have 8x bay ARECA too , but it's not TB2.

There is NO way 8x drive RAID5 ARECA can get 1000M/s out of it. lol

But then I'm refer to the TB2, not PCIe RAID
 
FireWire2 said:
There is NO way 8x drive RAID5 ARECA can get 1000M/s out of it. lol
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Umm.... "way." And this is ~50% full.

Areca%20RAID5.png


Edit: above are my numbers with 8X 4TB Seagate NAS drives, with array about half full.

Here is link to the manufacturer's numbers (presumable empty array). Drive types not specified:

http://www.areca.us/support/download/RaidCards/Documents/Performance/ARC8050T2_Benchmark-Mac.zip

Spitting distance to the 12-bay box, with 50% fewer drives. Something going on here. As I noted elsewhere, I think Apple's end-to-end Tbolt2 implementation must be a weak link.
 
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jasonvp said:
You're one of the lucky few then. My two have been on order since late Feb, and Apple is still saying, "Maybe late March, or late April."
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quick question have you received the r4's? i placed an order 5 days ago and i might not want to wait 2 months if its true unlike the guy who said it took 1 week to get.
 
Ok at the risk of being laughed at, I have to admit, I am very ignorant on RAID systems and you guys seem extremely well versed.

I got the Pegasus2 R4 with 4x 2TB Toshiba drives (came with). I didn't want a RAID system, I simply wanted a Thunderbolt 2 chassis for the hard drives I used in my previous gen Mac Pro. Basically, I used the Promise Utility to create this setup:

Bay 1 - iTunes Media
Bay 2 - 2 1TB partitions
Bay 3 and 4 - 4TB Time Machine backup volume

Obviously a non RAID configuration won't give me the speeds most of you are reporting, the speeds are still faster than the SATA II drives in my Mac Pro5,1. However, is there a "smarter" way in configuring this system to boost performance without losing too much drive space?
 
jasonvp said:
You're one of the lucky few then. My two have been on order since late Feb, and Apple is still saying, "Maybe late March, or late April."
Click to expand...

Ordered my diskless R4 on 3/8, just got status update to "Shipped". So three weeks for me.
 
Bosh said:
Ordered my diskless R4 on 3/8, just got status update to "Shipped". So three weeks for me.
Click to expand...

Mine finally showed up last week. Four weeks, basically. I suspect Apple just got a shipment of them in and they're able to fulfill orders now.

So far I have my 2 R4s, my 64GB of Hynix RAM ... but no Mac Pro. Grrr!
 
The new "LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt™ 2"; does anyone know if that can be used as a boot drive on the nMP? I.e. can I use it as a bootcamp drive for Windows?
 
Progress with the Empty R4s

In preparation for the arrival of my new Mac, I've been slowly moving pairs of disks out of my existing Mac Pro, and over to the 2 R4s. I installed the Promise Utility on my Macbook Pro so that I could drive the enclosures properly.

The first pair was my 2 300GB 10K RPM scratch drives. Those were in an ESATA enclosure that had them bound together in a "hardware" RAID0 array. The minute they spun up in the R4, my Macbook Pro said, "Hey, I don't recognize these. Format them?" Nope. I used the Promise Util to create a new RAID0 array, then used Disk Utility to rename it from "Promise RAID" to "Scratch".

Easy peasy.

The next pair was my 2 1TB "Media" drives, which were together in a software RAID0 array in the Mac Pro. Those spun up and the combined volume was immediately recognized by the Macbook Pro, and mounted appropriately. I checked, the filesystem was intact, the data also intact, and then I proceeded to unmount it. It'll become the Opt directory on my new Mac Pro, so I proceeded to nuke it by combining the drives into a hardware RAID0 in the Utility. Again, I renamed it in Disk Utility to "Opt", and all is well.

The last step, which I haven't started yet, will be to add the last 2 drives from the old Pro in and let the Macbook Pro mount them up as my old "Opt" (it should mount up as "Opt 2"). I'll tar all of the data off of the software RAID0 array over to the new "Opt", and then combine those last 2 drives into another hardware RAID0 array. They'll become "Media" on the new machine.

This darned Macbook Pro is handy... :)
 
Thunderbotl JBoD

bedifferent said:
Ok at the risk of being laughed at, I have to admit, I am very ignorant on RAID systems and you guys seem extremely well versed.

I got the Pegasus2 R4 with 4x 2TB Toshiba drives (came with). I didn't want a RAID system, I simply wanted a Thunderbolt 2 chassis for the hard drives I used in my previous gen Mac Pro. Basically, I used the Promise Utility to create this setup:

Bay 1 - iTunes Media
Bay 2 - 2 1TB partitions
Bay 3 and 4 - 4TB Time Machine backup volume

Obviously a non RAID configuration won't give me the speeds most of you are reporting, the speeds are still faster than the SATA II drives in my Mac Pro5,1. However, is there a "smarter" way in configuring this system to boost performance without losing too much drive space?
Click to expand...

With your configuration, you can easily done in 300's
sBOX-TJ - five drive SATAIII Thunderbolt

Just plug in to TB - Five (5) drives will show up, then you can use it or configure it as your desire

I use one slot with a SSD I got 335~365MB


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chrisn123 said:
Umm.... "way." And this is ~50% full.

Image

Edit: above are my numbers with 8X 4TB Seagate NAS drives, with array about half full.

Here is link to the manufacturer's numbers (presumable empty array). Drive types not specified:

http://www.areca.us/support/download/RaidCards/Documents/Performance/ARC8050T2_Benchmark-Mac.zip

Spitting distance to the 12-bay box, with 50% fewer drives. Something going on here. As I noted elsewhere, I think Apple's end-to-end Tbolt2 implementation must be a weak link.
Click to expand...

OK I have to check my 8 bay tray-less areca out... Thank you for the post

as TB2, I think there is a limit of sustain transfer, some where round 1300ish
- I read that some in this forum
 
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jasonvp said:
Um. That's an external PCI-E enclosure to connect to TBolt ports on a Mac. It's not an external disk chassis.
Click to expand...

True enough, but add either OWC, or Plextor PCIeSSD's and you have a nice little thing going on.
 
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