RAID Options

so the office I'm working in is looking to replace our front end storage. We are a digital photo studio, so no video editing, but we still need shared storage.

Currently due to our workflow this storage space is 3TB. I'm working on seeing what we can do to minimize this requirement because I'd really like to deploy some SSDs to speed it up.

Right now we are running off of a pegasus r6 thunderbolt setup with a mac mini. It's shared over a gigabit network and we get some moderate speeds off of it. It's not the throughput that's an issue as much as the delay while browsing the filesystem tree (loading thumbnails, subdirs, etc).

So my theory is that we can utilize some SSDs in order to minimize this delay. Objectively we aren't going to get any other benefit from a SSD on a gigabit network.

I'm just wondering if anyone has any advice - maybe I've missed something? I've been thinking about this for quite a while and it can get quite tricky at times.

So should I look at software raid0'ing some PCI (or regular) SSDs? Is there a product out there that does most of this headache?

Otherwise we are probably just going to deal with the delay for now and continue with a pegasus r4. It's pretty cheap!

 

yeah, it's regular tcp/ip

I don't think it's a network latency issue, we have real gigabit with an enterprise cisco switch

I believe the delay is in the HDD accessing the data itself, this isn't instantaneous locally either, obviously.

I'm not sure how much of an improvement iscsi would be, it's more like a replacement for FC and we aren't running 10Gb. might see some slight improvements overall, but it can't make the HDD access the data much faster than it already does. it's not really an option here as it's a lot of added complexity for what seems like little benefit.

whereas an SSD appliance would be easier to handle for most of the folk here

 

I'm going to pretend I'm not offended by your questions

I'm not asking how to get more speed out of what I already have. I'm asking if anyone here has used certain products or solutions that they can recommend in this scenario.

the drives use 7200 RPM disks, it's raid5 (i'm aware of the penalty), and our workflow isn't at issue in regards to disk I/O. no duh, hardware raid would be better, but I've seen mixed results for hardware raids with SSDs, and I was wondering if anyone here had experience with that. a software raid would be acceptable, even if finnicky, because we keep a hot spare system with regular backups. meaning that if the software raid went down, we could easily transition and continue to work. now I avoid software raids for that reason, but maybe it would be worth it if I could have a nice and fast front end.

maybe something like adaptec's hybrid raid would be good, but it doesn't seem to be OSX compatible.