Some help with a Pegasus R6

[dubaimac]

I am mid switch from a mac pro 2009 to a 2011 ultimate iMac with a thunderbolt display on a BOA II arm, I am looking at storage options, I have specced the SSD and 2TB drive, but I will use more, I have another 3 x3TB Hitachi's in the Mac Pro. I have bought an OWC enclosure to hold two of the drives, probably as JBOD as a backup. I want to buy the Pegasus R6, but need some help on RAID and how I can practically use it. I also have a Synology Ds1511+ and DX510 full of 2TB drives that we use for Media and time machine 9 and 4 TB respectively and growing!!! So I want a separate ultra fast storage for the iMac. I know its overkill for a personal machine but its my only vice!!!!!!
My questions are:
In Raid 5 then it would appear as one big disk, 9.7TB in the case of the R6?

Can I have individual folders within here, such as iTunes, crashplan backup, download storage?

Can I have two volumes within one R6?

Does anyone know if and when it was full, I could just replace the drives with 3TB drives, is it possible to upgrade them one by one, or do I have to start again?

If I want to backup a thunderbolt volume will it be seen by time machine?

Thanks in advance for any input.

 

[accessoriesguy]

I believe in RAID 5 you are protected from one hard drive, aka the hard drive is written in layers to all the other drives so in the case one collapses, you still have everything. However in Raid 6, two hard drives are completely safe from a collapse. if you had 6 Hard drives all equal memory and you did RAID 5 you would see only 5 drives. in RAID 6 you would see only 4 drives. I believe this is how it works.

For time machine you may have to change the backup options of allowing to backup attached hard drives but that should be all.

Hope that helps!

 

[admanimal]

In Raid 5 then it would appear as one big disk, 9.7TB in the case of the R6?

Any logical array you set up in the R6 will appear as one big disk to OS X.

Can I have individual folders within here, such as iTunes, crashplan backup, download storage?

Yes, it acts as a plain old hard drive as far as OS X is concerned.

Can I have two volumes within one R6?

Yes, you can set up multiple combinations of RAID volumes and/or single disks with the R6. For example, you can have all 6 disks in a RAID 5 array, or you could have 2 in RAID0, 2 in RAID1, and two in pass-thru mode (i.e. using them as regular single hard drives).

Does anyone know if and when it was full, I could just replace the drives with 3TB drives, is it possible to upgrade them one by one, or do I have to start again?

I'm pretty sure the answer is no. It might be possible to replace the drives one-by-one, but you would have to let the array rebuild the missing volume after each one, which can take hours, and I'm not sure if it would even recognize the extra 1TB of space from each drive when you were done swapping the drives. The solution is to move the data somewhere else, replace the drives, and build a new array.

If I want to backup a thunderbolt volume will it be seen by time machine?

Yes, they work like any other drive.

 

[CWallace]

Does anyone know if and when it was full, I could just replace the drives with 3TB drives, is it possible to upgrade them one by one, or do I have to start again?

You have to start again. If you pull a 2TB drive and replace it with a 3TB, the array will treat it as a 2TB drive during the rebuild process.

Drobo does allow larger drives to be swapped and the extra space to be used, however, right now I believe only the NAS / iSCSI models support 3TB drives. The USB/FW800 unit currently supports 2TB with a 3TB firmware in development.

 

[dubaimac]

thanks for your help guys, I always have spare disks around. So I think I will be able to empty it before upgrading all the disks. One Pegasus R6 to order today.