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Pegasus2 R4 vs Lacie Big5 for over 10TB

Sinx2oic

Sinx2oic

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 26, 2009
142
0
So trying to work out what External RAID to get with my new nMP.

PROMISE Pegasus2 R4 Diskless 4Bay ($699/£426.19 + say £100 for shipping to UK = £540)
with four of these.
HGST 4TB DeskStar 7K4000 SATA 6Gb/s 7200RPM 64MB 3.5" Hard Drive (£145x4 = £580) would these be the best drives?
So in Total £1,120. What speed would you expect to get with 4x4TB in the R4?
With what ever the fastest RAID is (without worrying loosing data) I've read RAID 0 or RAID 5

Or LaCie 5big thunderbolt 10TB is £820 20TB is £1,500

I basically need at least 10TB for all my animation work. Sorry I'm not very clued up on all this RAID stuff even after reading about it. Any advise would be useful! ;)
 
You need at least 10GB so if you get the Pegasus and mirror the 4TB drives, you're only going to get 8GB. RAID gives you data redundancy (other then RAID O) so if you're not going to embrace that safety feature either unit will work.

Personally, I'd get the Pegasus, with larger drives to give you the storage space you need and the RAID protection that you'll want.

RAID is no substitute for backups so you need to consider a backup strategy as well.
 
maflynn said:
You need at least 10GB so if you get the Pegasus and mirror the 4TB drives, you're only going to get 8GB. RAID gives you data redundancy (other then RAID O) so if you're not going to embrace that safety feature either unit will work.

Personally, I'd get the Pegasus, with larger drives to give you the storage space you need and the RAID protection that you'll want.

RAID is no substitute for backups so you need to consider a backup strategy as well.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I have loads of old drives to back up on so not worried about that. I am after the fastest option really. Is that RAID 0 then? If so speed wise would they both be about the same? Thanks again
 
RAID 0 is the fastest and the most riskiest as if something occurs on one volume, you lose your entire RAID volume set and all your data. I wouldn't use RAID 0 but that's just me.
 
Sinx2oic said:
So trying to work out what External RAID to get with my new nMP.

PROMISE Pegasus2 R4 Diskless 4Bay ($699/£426.19 + say £100 for shipping to UK = £540)
with four of these.
HGST 4TB DeskStar 7K4000 SATA 6Gb/s 7200RPM 64MB 3.5" Hard Drive (£145x4 = £580) would these be the best drives?
So in Total £1,120. What speed would you expect to get with 4x4TB in the R4?
With what ever the fastest RAID is (without worrying loosing data) I've read RAID 0 or RAID 5

Or LaCie 5big thunderbolt 10TB is £820 20TB is £1,500

I basically need at least 10TB for all my animation work. Sorry I'm not very clued up on all this RAID stuff even after reading about it. Any advise would be useful! ;)
Click to expand...

You have not included the VAT and customs charges that you will be forced to pay by ordering from the US.
 
I have a peg r6 I run 3 sets of raid0 each one is 8th I use hitachi 4th hdds. flawless as of today for almost 2 years of use.
the 2 drives in a raid0 push 300 for long reads and writes
 
philipma1957 said:
I have a peg r6 I run 3 sets of raid0 each one is 8th I use hitachi 4th hdds. flawless as of today for almost 2 years of use.
the 2 drives in a raid0 push 300 for long reads and writes
Click to expand...

Why don't you just use raid 5, get higher speeds and security and one volume to clutter your desktop with???
 
Think I am now leading towards the R4 diskless - just wish they sold it in the UK. :eek:
 
I've got a MacPro with 2 ProAVIO towers connected via a PCI-E card, 10 disks per tower, striped as RAID-5 (with 1 disk as a hot spare for automatic fallback). I'll be buying a new Mac Pro at some point in the near future, so will be looking at thunderbolt options then.

As others have said here, you really want to get some kind of data protection for your data. Hard drives do fail - I've RMA'd at least two "enterprise edition RE4" disks already in the last 3 years - and you'll be kicking yourself if you lose all your work!

RAID-5 (or RAID-6 for large arrays) is the way to go. The Pegasus is very good for this, but is difficult to buy without disks. To be honest though, setting up a RAID can be more complex than you might be aware off - eg. do you know the difference between "write back" and "write though" for cache policy? ;) - so buying a unit already setup is not a bad idea.

If you're in the UK (like me) I highly recommend this company - http://www.rentaraid.co.uk/ - for anything RAID-related. They sell plenty of thunderbolt RAID solutions, including ones by Areca (really high performance and good value for money) and their after sales support is excellent.
 
FireWire2 said:
Just want to throw in the mix -
Areca
http://www.areca.com.tw/products/thunderbolt.htm
Click to expand...

This is a VERY interesting option that I've just discovered the last few days. From the user base, it appears that these are held in very high regard by current users, with the negative being the difficulty of initial setup. But the price for a full hardware RAID, vs the software RAID of the Pegasus, is pretty amazing.
 
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