LaCie 5Big Thunderbolt - To Raid 0 or Not

[fridgeymonster3]

I recently was given a 10TB LaCie 5Big Thunderbolt. I'm only going to use it to hold my media collection that is connected to my Mac Mini, which will be served up to the Apple TV 3s in my house. My house is wired with gigabit ethernet, which I know theoretically tops out at 125 MB/s.

My only question is woud anybody stick the 5 drives in Raid 0, or just go individual disks? As the individual disks fill up, they'll slow down to speeds that will be less than the 125 MB/s limit, but even so, the Apple TVs aren't even gigabit. Therefore, is there any reason to have the drives in Raid 0??

FYI - I have an unbelievably thorough backup system that would allow me to recover my data without losing more than an hour or a week's worth of media (depending on what/how many of my backups were to fail simultaneously with a Raid 0 array).

Thanks for the input.

 

[FireWire2]

I recently was given a 10TB LaCie 5Big Thunderbolt. I'm only going to use it to hold my media collection that is connected to my Mac Mini, which will be served up to the Apple TV 3s in my house. My house is wired with gigabit ethernet, which I know theoretically tops out at 125 MB/s.

My only question is woud anybody stick the 5 drives in Raid 0, or just go individual disks? As the individual disks fill up, they'll slow down to speeds that will be less than the 125 MB/s limit, but even so, the Apple TVs aren't even gigabit. Therefore, is there any reason to have the drives in Raid 0??

FYI - I have an unbelievably thorough backup system that would allow me to recover my data without losing more than an hour or a week's worth of media (depending on what/how many of my backups were to fail simultaneously with a Raid 0 array).

Thanks for the input.

With all the back up in place and willing to loose some data.
I dont see why not set at RAID0 to maximized the storage.

There are other RAID5 boxes TB and USB3.0 out there for more reliable, but nothing can beat $0.00 cost

 

[fridgeymonster3]

Yeah, Raid 5 would have been preferable, but with adequate backups, I figured I might go with Raid 0. My only choices are Raid 0, Raid 1, or JBOD. I want the most capacity, so Raid 1 was eliminated.

Anyone else running a 5Big TB in Raid 0 that can give me some insight?

 

[marzer]

Yeah, Raid 5 would have been preferable, but with adequate backups, I figured I might go with Raid 0. My only choices are Raid 0, Raid 1, or JBOD. I want the most capacity, so Raid 1 was eliminated.

Anyone else running a 5Big TB in Raid 0 that can give me some insight?

I run 2x2big Thunderbolt drives for a total of 4 hard drives with 12TB of capacity. Two drives are in RAID1 config to hold my media library, two are in RAID0 to hold backups. I assume like the 2big all drives in the 5big show up as independent drives. So you should be able to group them into subsets for different types of RAID sets.

 

[colshine]

I've got the LaCie 20TB version - I put three drives in RAID 0 and two in RAID 1. I use the RAID 1 for my Time Machine backups. The RAID 0 is for expanding storage. This backed up to a NAS every night.

 

[g4cube]

I've got the LaCie 20TB version - I put three drives in RAID 0 and two in RAID 1. I use the RAID 1 for my Time Machine backups. The RAID 0 is for expanding storage. This backed up to a NAS every night.

Very nice!

That's how I have mine setup, and I used the raid-0 portion for video editing.

Note for streaming, the newer 3tb and 4tb drives individually deliver 150-190 MB/sec performance so you'll want to consider that, too. No need to go raid-0 for streaming. That's overkill, and risking safety should you have a problem with a single disk in a striped raid-0 array. Think carefully about that.

If you do use raid-0, do make sure you have a reliable backup process, and remember that the backup is you second copy of your important files, never your only copy.

I've seen many users run out of space on one drive or array, who copy the files to a "backup" drive, only to delete the original to free up space. They are in a world of hurt should something go wrong as they now have only the original files, just relocated to the "backup" drive.

With terabytes of information, need to really think about your backup strategy.

Mine?

Many more 4tb drives with 2nd and 3rd copies of files, with critical 4th copies in the cloud.

 

[fridgeymonster3]

Very nice!

That's how I have mine setup, and I used the raid-0 portion for video editing.

Note for streaming, the newer 3tb and 4tb drives individually deliver 150-190 MB/sec performance so you'll want to consider that, too. No need to go raid-0 for streaming. That's overkill, and risking safety should you have a problem with a single disk in a striped raid-0 array. Think carefully about that.

If you do use raid-0, do make sure you have a reliable backup process, and remember that the backup is you second copy of your important files, never your only copy.

I've seen many users run out of space on one drive or array, who copy the files to a "backup" drive, only to delete the original to free up space. They are in a world of hurt should something go wrong as they now have only the original files, just relocated to the "backup" drive.

With terabytes of information, need to really think about your backup strategy.

Mine?

Many more 4tb drives with 2nd and 3rd copies of files, with critical 4th copies in the cloud.

Yeah, I'm leaning towards JBOD. I'm confident in my backup strategy that I won't lose data, but it'd still be a hassle to have the entire array fail and have to transfer all my data from my backups.

I'm going to replace the 2 TB drives with 3 or 4 TB drives, so I have room to keep them less than 75% full which should maintain decent read/write performance.