SSD or HDD in a ThunderBay 4 for audio work?

[jordanz]

Getting a OWC ThunderBay 4 thunderbolt RAID box to host my iTunes and audio sample libraries for DAW work. Needs to be quick importing files into the DAW (Ableton). Will be getting the new 27" iMac with the faster SSD speeds (1800mb/s) so that won't be a bottleneck here (Ableton cache folder stored on the Mac OS SSD).

iTunes artwork/database will be stored on the Mac OS SSD but the actual mp3s/wavs will be on the ThunderBay.

Will there be a performance difference putting in 1TB SSD's as oppososed to, say, WD Red 3TB HDD's for this use case? Thanks!

 

[Gav2k]

Raid 5 enables striping so you'll see a boost in speed for platter based drives. If you were to use a good performing 7200 drives then you won't notice any significant drop in performance over ssd once the files are copied over.

 

[jordanz]

Raid 5 enables striping so you'll see a boost in speed for platter based drives. If you were to use a good performing 7200 drives then you won't notice any significant drop in performance over ssd once the files are copied over.

Hmm interesting! Originally thought to do RAID 5 but now I'm thinking 2 drives in RAID-0 and setting up the other 2 drive bays in another RAID-0 to mirror the first volume. Just worried about the noise of those 7200 drives compared to the WD reds / NAS drives. Obviously SSD wins in the quiet category though.

 

[Gav2k]

Hmm interesting! Originally thought to do RAID 5 but now I'm thinking 2 drives in RAID-0 and setting up the other 2 drive bays in another RAID-0 to mirror the first volume. Just worried about the noise of those 7200 drives compared to the WD reds / NAS drives. Obviously SSD wins in the quiet category though.

Wd reds spin between 5400 and 7200 depending on data transfer so your all good there. On the raid 0 standpoint you won't see any gain over raid 5 as raid 5 stripes the array anyway

 

[matreya]

I would (from experience) recommend HGST Deskstar NAS over WD Red. The HGSTs are real 7200 RPM HDDs and they're pretty quiet (I have 8 x 3TB of them in a pair of hardware RAID5 enclosures).

 

[ColdCase]

Stay away from RAID 5 and larger drives. RAID 0 with mirror takes much less time to rebuild... well no time beside copying from the backup. With the advent of large an inexpensive drives, RAID5 has lost its advantaged except for a few use cases. You can also save some $ as you don't need hardware RAID. Disk utility does RAID0 and Mirror nicely.

As far as SSD vs spinners, I have both for video applications. I like SSD, if you can afford them, as there is zero spin up time, no noise, and less power/heat. Black magic on my rMBP shows a single SSD in a TB enclosure provides about 380/360 read/write where a pair of Seagate enterprise drives in RAID0 provide 300/300. Probably not a noticeable difference to most. I use 850 Pros with their 10 year warranty. The spinners are now archive/backup drives. I use them for the Itunes library too.

I've had poor luck with recent HGST drives, the WD REDs have been trouble free, both 4TB and 6TB. The 4TB are pro series.