iMac and NAS for photos - USB3, TB - advice needed for Lightroom and PS (speed)

[sjac]

Hi!

As a professional photographer I just switched from an old MP 3,1 (ram died, didn't wanted to purchase new ddr2) to a new iMac.

On the MP I had my photos (2,5TB and growing) on an seperate internal hd. For the new iMac I want to keep OSX and apps on the internal ssd. Now I'm looking for a good solution to store my photos but I don't want to have a lack in performance.

Photos from 5D3 are about 20-30MB, my .psd's can take up to 1GB.
My main work is Lightroom and Photoshop.
I do need a good speed for accessing my pics thru LR to keep my workflow clean and steady.

My 1st thought was buying a LaCie 2big Thunderbolt 6TB drive (raid 0) as main storage. This would give me (imo) the best performance.
As raid 0 can be dangerous I do need a backup solution and thought about a Synology NAS for Time Machine.

At the moment I dropped the idea with LaCie and thought about only having a Synology NAS (DS-412+) with 4 Seagate Constellation ES.3 hd's in raid 5 connected by USB 3.

As I don't have any experience with TB nor USB 3 I'd like to know if anybody of you has been in the same scenario: iMac, Lightroom and photos on external drive / good speed with LR.

Any advice (or food for thought) is highly appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
sjac

 

[marzer]

My 1st thought was buying a LaCie 2big Thunderbolt 6TB drive (raid 0) as main storage.

I have two of those units, daisy chained. They are very impressive devices. One is RAID1 for 3TB of mirrored primary storage and the second is 6TB of RAID0 storage for backups.

The RAID1 box roughly benches at 145MB/s read/write and the RAID0 at roughly 300MB/s read/write.

 

[thedeske]

Several in my circle are using Caldigit AV Pro 4TB (USB3 only model is around 388-399) The 4TB model is a 5 platter Hitachi Deskstar and gets 200MB/s up and down with new USB3 Macs. We all keep the catalogs and pics on the Caldig. 2 Use a second unit for redundant copies. 1 uses additional swap trays for bank vault storage.

Raid would be faster, but we agree, it's not a backup.

 

[sjac]

I have two of those units, daisy chained. They are very impressive devices. One is RAID1 for 3TB of mirrored primary storage and the second is 6TB of RAID0 storage for backups.

The RAID1 box roughly benches at 145MB/s read/write and the RAID0 at roughly 300MB/s read/write.

Thanks for the reply. Do you have any noise issues with the 2big? Some owners of them are complaining about them beeing very loud.

 

[marzer]

Thanks for the reply. Do you have any noise issues with the 2big? Some owners of them are complaining about them beeing very loud.

Unfortunately that's difficult for me to evaluate. They are operated in the basement storage room as part of a rack system.

 

[monsieurpaul]

To my knowledge you won't be able to connect the Synology to the iMac using USB3. The Syno needs to be plugged on the network.