Hard drive array/solutions for Mac Studio

[juliancs]

Hello,
Excited to retire my 2010 Mac Pro in a few months when I'll order a Studio.

I have my hard drive bays full on my Mac Pro - OS HD, and 4 SSDs for storage/samples/scratch disks.

There is enough I/O on the Studio to plug them all in, but I was wondering if there is a neater solution to use perhaps only one port, and avoid having 4 external hard drives all over the place. I'm not familiar with RAID setups or that kind of thing, but I'm wondering if there is a nice looking "cage"/"hub" I could plug 5 SSDs into, and have that plugged into a single port on the Mac. I don't know if this would cause performance issues to have all going through one port.

I'm OK to re-buy new SSDs to make it fit an enclosure/cage, and while my budget is 25k like some RAIDs I've seen, I'm just fishing for ideas here.

Many thanks!

 

[lcubed]

depending on the form factor of your ssd’s, some of the owc thunder bay multi drive enclosure may fit your need.

we’re using a thunder bay mini with 4 4TB SSD in a RAID 4, but this same enclosure can be used without RAID for JBOD (just a bunch of disks). the performance will be limited to the capabilities of each individual drives

 

[aliennerd]

I was thinking of keeping my 5,1 as the drive enclosure and connecting to the Sonnet Solo 10 Gigabit card I have in it via the 10 GBE port on the Studio. Not very energy efficient I know but saves a bit of money for now and 10 GBE is plenty fast enough for me.

 

[MarkC426]

I was thinking of keeping my 5,1 as the drive enclosure and connecting to the Sonnet Solo 10 Gigabit card

Just looked at (I think it was the right one) on Amazon....£214.
Does that sound correct?

It does seem a bit excessive use of power, considering how 'low power' the studio is, to then leave a 'hungry' macpro running just for the storage.

 

[MarkC426]

Hello,
Excited to retire my 2010 Mac Pro in a few months when I'll order a Studio.

If you ordered one today, you MAY have it in 10-12 weeks, depending on the spec and the latest happenings in China.
Just something to consider, if it's needed for a project in the near future.

 

[aliennerd]

Just looked at (I think it was the right one) on Amazon....£214.
Does that sound correct?

It does seem a bit excessive use of power, considering how 'low power' the studio is, to then leave a 'hungry' macpro running just for the storage.

The one I use is currently £111.40 on Amazon:- Sonnet G10E-1X-E3 Internal Ethernet Network Card 10000 Mbit/s

 

[SpotOnT]

I second the OWC suggestion.

I use two sets of their 4 bay enclosures. They can be configured as an array, but I just leave them all as individual drives. The Thunderbolt enclosures are a bit pricey. The USB boxes are more reasonable. So it just depends on the speed of the drives you plan to use and the corresponding bandwidth. Build quality is identical on either.

If you prefer connecting over ethernet rather than Thunderbolt/USB, there is always QNAP and Synology boxes. Those can pull second duty as a NAS, if needed.

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

Hello,
Excited to retire my 2010 Mac Pro in a few months when I'll order a Studio.

I have my hard drive bays full on my Mac Pro - OS HD, and 4 SSDs for storage/samples/scratch disks.

There is enough I/O on the Studio to plug them all in, but I was wondering if there is a neater solution to use perhaps only one port, and avoid having 4 external hard drives all over the place. I'm not familiar with RAID setups or that kind of thing, but I'm wondering if there is a nice looking "cage"/"hub" I could plug 5 SSDs into, and have that plugged into a single port on the Mac. I don't know if this would cause performance issues to have all going through one port.

I'm OK to re-buy new SSDs to make it fit an enclosure/cage, and while my budget is 25k like some RAIDs I've seen, I'm just fishing for ideas here.

Many thanks!

It really depends on what your workload is. I wouldn't reuse your old Mac Pro, especially if you have the budget you suggest. Instead, get something simple like a NAS and put in a 10GBe card. If you want more SSDs attached to the Studio itself then maybe wait until the aluminium Thunderbolt 3/4 bases come out that will match the look of the Studio. I'm sure there'll be a dual NVME Thunderbolt 3/4 solution within a few months. If you can't wait, just get a Thunderbolt 3 NVME enclosure like the Orico ones and put an 8TB Sabrent SSD in there. Since you're coming from a 2010 Mac Pro, that is already going to run circles around anything you had before. If you weren't using an NVME PCIe adapter and were using old SATA SSDs in the Mac Pro's drive bays then... I don't know how you've coped this long and the £1500/$1500 it'd cost for an Orico Thunderbolt 3 NVME enclosure with one 8TB Sabrent NVME SSD in will feel like going from walking to flying a jet plane.

 

[trevoclark]

I picked up a Synology 1520+ NAS this year, loaded it up with 5 4TB drives and 2 NVMe. With their hybrid RAID I have 10.5TB of space with two drive redundancy. Its been amazing. Have my machines backing up with Time Machine, all movies on there and can stream them for anywhere. All in around $1000. I bought renewed drives on Amazon. They're $50/each, all of them working great. If that's in your budget go for it. If your budget is as high as you say it is, could go 8TB or higher on each drive and have some properly insane redundant storage. Trick is buying immediately. I waited two months for the NAS to be back in stock.

But for sure know that they can be loud with spinning drives. You can use SSDs, but spinning drives give you more of a heads up if something is going to fail, and the speed difference will be negligible; your bottleneck will be the network not the drive speeds. Best of luck!

 

[bsbeamer]

From a similar thread, been using this as I began the transition away from an MP5,1.

I'd invest in 4+ SATA drive bay vs. single/dual bay. Even as NVMe capacity increases, there will "always" be a need for larger capacity SATA SSD and HDD for the foreseeable future.

Been using this for awhile:
Oyen Digital Mobius Pro 5C 5-Bay USB-C External Drive Enclosure (3N5-C-M)

Oyen Digital Mobius Pro 5C 5-Bay USB-C External Drive Enclosure (3N5-C-M)

The Mobius Pro 5C 5-Bay storage system is designed to meet the needs of power users with the most demanding storage requirements. The tray-less design provides a simple method for HDD removal and insertion - simply pull the lever to insert or withdraw the HDDs.

www.amazon.com

Only issue with 2.5" is it needs an adapter like this:

ORICO 2.5 SSD SATA to 3.5 Hard Drive Adapter Internal Drive Bay Converter Mounting Bracket Caddy Tray for 7 / 9.5 / 12.5mm 2.5 inch HDD / SSD with SATA III Interface(1125SS)

ORICO 2.5 SSD SATA to 3.5 Hard Drive Adapter Internal Drive Bay Converter Mounting Bracket Caddy Tray for 7 / 9.5 / 12.5mm 2.5 inch HDD / SSD with SATA III Interface(1125SS)

www.amazon.com

USB 3.1 10Gbps is more than enough for 550Mb/s SATA SSDs