I figured I'd put up a thread to sing the praises of these two amazing storage solutions.
As a professional photographer...I'm always in the search for solutions that allow me to transfer and edit files as quickly as possible. For a while I used the Promise Pegasus R6 to house both my images and a backup. Just a few weeks ago, after getting my new Mac Pro, I decided to take a leap of faith and make a very substantial investment into a couple of new storage options. So far, I've been beyond happy with the setup.
I purchased four Lacie Thunderbolt 2 PCIe 1TB external drives and set them up into a 4TB RAID 0. Two of them are each plugged into separate Thunderbolt 2 sockets, so that, as a single array, they use two Thunderbolt sockets instead of one. I used this array to hold my current Lightroom catalogue and the corresponding RAW files. The attached file is the Blackmagic test for this array.
Then I use an Areca ARC-8050T2 to hold all of my subsequent catalogues and RAW files...the idea being that whenever the Lacie array (4TB) filled up, I transfer that catalogue to the Areca array, and open a new catalogue for my current database. The Areca has 8 bays of 4TB WD Red drives installed, in a RAID 10 array which gives me 16TB of useable space. This array gets about 600 MB/s...not bad at all for standard 7200 WD Red drives.
I now use the old Pegasus 2 R6s as the backups for this setup.
This setup was a good bit more than I actually wanted to spend...but even considering the significant price paid, I am incredibly happy with the result.
By the way, the Pegasus R6 is an excellent storage option as well...when I first bought it, they did not support SSDs...but a recent firmware update took care of that problem and they now hold pretty much any hard drive or SSD I've thrown at it.
As a professional photographer...I'm always in the search for solutions that allow me to transfer and edit files as quickly as possible. For a while I used the Promise Pegasus R6 to house both my images and a backup. Just a few weeks ago, after getting my new Mac Pro, I decided to take a leap of faith and make a very substantial investment into a couple of new storage options. So far, I've been beyond happy with the setup.
I purchased four Lacie Thunderbolt 2 PCIe 1TB external drives and set them up into a 4TB RAID 0. Two of them are each plugged into separate Thunderbolt 2 sockets, so that, as a single array, they use two Thunderbolt sockets instead of one. I used this array to hold my current Lightroom catalogue and the corresponding RAW files. The attached file is the Blackmagic test for this array.
Then I use an Areca ARC-8050T2 to hold all of my subsequent catalogues and RAW files...the idea being that whenever the Lacie array (4TB) filled up, I transfer that catalogue to the Areca array, and open a new catalogue for my current database. The Areca has 8 bays of 4TB WD Red drives installed, in a RAID 10 array which gives me 16TB of useable space. This array gets about 600 MB/s...not bad at all for standard 7200 WD Red drives.
I now use the old Pegasus 2 R6s as the backups for this setup.
This setup was a good bit more than I actually wanted to spend...but even considering the significant price paid, I am incredibly happy with the result.
By the way, the Pegasus R6 is an excellent storage option as well...when I first bought it, they did not support SSDs...but a recent firmware update took care of that problem and they now hold pretty much any hard drive or SSD I've thrown at it.
