Single to multi storage division guidance recommended

[AnakChan]

I'm moving up from a late 2009 iMac 27" to an iMac Pro soon. My late 2009 iMac has got a single 8TB internal which I upgraded myself few years back which is about 7TB full (further 3TB in external TimeCapsule). The new target iMac Pro will be the 4TB SSD.

Naturally I won't be able to squeeze everything in. I'm likely getting an external Akitio (or OWC?) SATA->TB3 enclosure. Not decided if I'll go for the 2 or 4 (and get extra disks to stripe). Of the 7TB internal @ the moment but majority is roughly like this :-

• Music 1.75TB (iTunes + Audirvana+ PCM, HiRes, DSD, etc.)
• Pictures 1.6TB (Photos + Lightroom RAW/JPG)
• Desktop 2.0TB - Majority of this are my astronomy work photos for PixInsight (one of the reasons for getting the iMac Pro instead of iMac)

I'm likely going to dedicate the iMac Pro 4TB for the Astro photo files for PixInsight and additional swap for PixInsight.

For the rest of the data however, as mentioned, I'm likely picking up an Akitio/OWC external TB3 enclosure. However, I've never played with TB3 before. How do TB3 drives mount? Do they mount like USB external drives/sticks, etc.? I know I can set the Photos, Lightroom, iTunes, Audirvana+ libraries to point to a separate path, or keep apps default path and symlink to the external drive?

 

[AnakChan]

Bumping this but also providing a little more update as I've been researching a little more. A few changes to the original post is that I'm likely going to be having multiple OSes on my iMac Pro (going to be delivered in 2 days!) and will probably partition the internal 4TB SSD into High Sierra, Windows 10, and some flavour of Linux that's PixInsight-friendly.

Looking at DAS-styled external storage such as the Akitio Thunder3, OWC ThunderBay, or G-Tech, etc. it seems it's not easy to find a common filesystem format that would work easily with all 3 OSes especially without requiring 3rd party (Paragon) drivers.

I did look at NAS alternatives such as the QNAP TS-453BT3 however even with Thunderbolt 3 support, it seems to go through the 10GbE adapter with SMB protocol therefore there's some performance losses there too as it'll be gong over the different TCP and SMB (and NFS?) protocols.

Is NAS my only option if I have an external disk that's going to be readable by 3 different OSes? Or are there folks here who have experiences with some common filesystem that I could use with all 3 OSes with DAS/Direct Attached Storage?

I'm likely to dump all my data into the external and to keep the internal SSD for the 3 OSes, swap, and temp working files.

P.S. I'm avoiding FAT32 if possible and it would be nice if there's a recommended FS that (aside from being compatible to all 3 OSes) have journal-ling, case sensitive, cater for file sizes over 4GB, etc.

 

[Gav2k]

With multi os’s in the mix you really should be going for a nas as it simplifies and streamlines everything.

I’d recommend QNAP as I’ve used them for a long time. But Synology would be a cheaper option too.

If you don’t want to set up a nas then you need an always on machine and then setup network shares.

Choice obviously is yours.