Xs 1,1-3,1 Mac Xserve raid in 2023

[Muziekschuur]

The Xserve raid is one of those marvels of all aluminium cases. Is it outdated? Maybe. But a fiber to utp box costs 20 bux and pata to sata connectors are like 7 bux a pop. And then you can still fit 14 2,5 inch ssd's in a rack.

Would that make sense for a home? No.

Would it make sense for a small business? Yes...

Raid made sense for spinning harddrives. But with ssd's it makes much less sense. But if you use it as JBOD (just a bunch of disks) it's ideal as central storage.

If it has a timer and brought to life to do every day a 1 hour central backup it could be a great way to fly?

 

[Muziekschuur]

Thank you for moving. This seems logical. But maybe a new category for Mac products is in order? The servers? I mean there are a lot of mac mini servers too?

 

[The Spif]

The Xserve raid is one of those marvels of all aluminium cases. Is it outdated? Maybe. But a fiber to utp box costs 20 bux and pata to sata connectors are like 7 bux a pop. And then you can still fit 14 2,5 inch ssd's in a rack.

Would that make sense for a home? No.

Would it make sense for a small business? Yes...

Raid made sense for spinning harddrives. But with ssd's it makes much less sense. But if you use it as JBOD (just a bunch of disks) it's ideal as central storage.

If it has a timer and brought to life to do every day a 1 hour central backup it could be a great way to fly?

Unless you are trying to recreate an old setup for some reason, the Xserve RAID still doesn't make sense - as JBOD or anything else. At best you can have 14TB total storage at a whopping 2Gbit transfer rate (doubled if you stripe). Add to that the additional power requirements for the enclosure and it becomes a clearly terrible idea.

This from a guy who still has an SFP Xserve RAID and Xserves from G4 1.33 through 2009 Intels.

 

[Dog Knight]

I had a Xserve RAID for a while, paired with a G5 tower running 10.5 server. Had 14 x 500gb HDD's in it.

I ended up only using it to dump files on when I was reformatting a machine. Being server grade equipment, it has redundant power supply's and server level fans. Very noisy, very power hungry, not great performance. Even over Fiber.

Great for tinkering with but not worth it as a practical solution these days.
If you just need a mass storage dump, buy a large external USB hard drive and attach it to your router. Will probably be similar performance depending on your router.