Storage Solution for iMac 5K for Photographer ?

This is what you want, and very cost effective. http://www.seagate.com/external-hard-drives/portable-hard-drives/performance/backup-plus-fast-hdd/ It is super fast as I edit 4K video off it without a hiccup.

Thunderbolt isn't necessary unless you have RAID stripped SSDs. Since you need massive amounts of fast storage, you need RAID spinners and they can't saturate USB 3.

 

During most of the discussions here the Segate drives have been hammered as being one of the most unreliable drives around. Thoughts?

 

Western Digital makes a similar solution with Thunderbolt. But same sort of read/write for more money. Still bus powered and very fast. http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1240 So far my Seagates are humming along. (And Seagate bought WD last year....)

 

I have this one http://www.amazon.co.uk/VelociRapto...446301369&sr=8-1&keywords=wd+velociraptor+duo

I am getting 380MB read and 340MB write speeds...just wow. I got from ebay brand new in less than half the retail price.

 

I have things set up like this:

Two Lacie Rugged 2TB disks connected to my iMac. One is general storage and one is only for images.

So on the one for photos, I have my Lightroom catalogs and all my RAW and exports. I sometimes unplug this drive and use it on my laptop. Since everything is one the drive, its plug and play where i left off. Perfect for me.

For backup I have Carbon Copy Cloner backup all new files to a 4TB disk that i plug in once a month. It is turned of and unplugged during all other times.

I also have a second backup for the photos, which is a 2TB drive. I backup to this one as well as the 4TB at the same time.

Therefore I always have my photos etc. on three drives.

I have contemplated a NAS for a long time, but since I never have to access things from outside my home, its much cheaper using regular drives and multiple backups. And also, it is much faster to edit on local drives!

To answer the enclosure question. I would buy one for OWC that has raid, and run raid 1 with the 6TB disks.

 

I have a Drobo 5D - let the hardware take care of the RAID details then format it as a giant disk. Throw in the disks then put a mATA card in the bottom and you'll find that once hooked up to the thunderbolt port that things will run fairly smoothly.

 

One thing about the Drobo 5D is that it takes a while to boot up and configured as raid5 is slower than hardware raid. I see about 253 MB/s write and 428 MB/s read. My Pegasus R6 runs about 633 MB/s write and 631 MB/s read. There is a cost for convenience.

The May Backblaze report had annual Seagate failure rates running from 0 to an astounding 31.8%. The Barracudas line faired the worst of all the disks they reported on, with failure rates (rounded) of 32%, 12%, 0%, 27%, 3%, 5% annually. Western Digital had (rounded) 13%, 9%, 7% failure rates annually. Toshiba had 5.1%, 0%, and 0%. HGST ranged from .39% to a max of 2%.

 

As a professional photographer, I use this.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/External-Drive/OWC/Elite-Dual-RAID

500gb ssd on the imac for my day to day work and edits, all old files, media files, and cr2 raw images are stored in this bay.

 

perhaps the Lacie solutions are something for you, look for the size you need for raid 1 and get the ports you want. They are expensive though last time I checked.
After having seen my OWC raid (2 out of 4 hd done) fail, I went back to the more expensive, very beautiful stuff.
I have a 5big quadra 20tb (someting like that) and since it features 2 TB ports you can use it to daisy chain one additional peripheral, if this is something you might want.
I chained the 27" cinema display for working in lightroom and photoshop, I suppose the latency is bad but I never tested it.

 

I have a 1tb SSD on my iMac and an external 8TB Mybook Duo Thunderbolt were I move all finished "old" projects. The 8tb DUO is set to raid, so its essentially just 4gb with added security. ANd I have one other 4tb Thunderbolt drive which only does time capsule backup of my main 1tb SSD in case my OS would crash or I do something stupid. ..Of course all my current work is on Dropbox, so multiple securities and the ability to share work files with clients all the time.

This system works perfectly for me.

Btw, I would stay away from Lacie, I've tried them all. The are noisy!! and gets easily broken if they fall over - and no warranty if that happens. I had a Lacie 2big, it was horrible noisy...switched to the d2 (which only has 1 drive - but even that one is noise despite they brag about it being super silent.... Then I bought a cheaper My Book Duo, because its not the main hard drive I work on, the speed difference is not noticeable (I dont think it would be noticeable regardless). I still have the rugged Lacie thunderbolt as the time capsule backup though, they are decent...but not worth the price unless you drag it around with you.

 

I'd agree with them being noisy, not horribly but certainly louder than the "near silent" being advertised everywhere. Haven't heard about this lack of coverage by the warranty, but I'll check this for sure, thank you!

Also, this summer the Lacie shut down due to overheating or at least close before that, in the midst of backing up to another raid. RAID was running non stop for about 8-9h?
nothing happened though, the RAID stopped the transfers, kept the fans on for as long as it was hot and then turned off, the HDs being nice and cool.
Could be prone to overheating or could be a safety feature.


http://www.lacie.com/products/thunderbolt/5big-thunderbolt-2/
I remember the 20tb version to be roughly 10% cheaper but that might have been some discount or currency advantages.
looks great.

 

I do quite a bit with my iMac depending on what my needs are in that week. I do photography in batches and have a NAS.

You say that the problem with your NAS is that it's too slow unless you hook it up directly to the Mac Mini you are working with now. That to me says the problem is not the NAS at all, but that other piece of hardware that you have between the two devices. Chances are that most people use thier internet home router that comes with 4 additional port hub on the back and don't realize that device is slow as molasses in the north pole. No wonder it's just too slow.

Why go out and spend through the roof to re-invent the wheel and put on some USB3/Thunderbolt drive that will not give you the capacity that your current hardware gives, when the solution to your issue is spending $100 on a proper port forwarding SWITCH that has the bandwidth capability that your NAS and Mac can handle. Take a look at a Cisco SG200-08 (SLM2008T) 8-port Gigabit Ethernet Smart Switch as that will give you about 75 MB/s on read/write. Yes you can get more with DAS. My Lacie Thunderbolt drive gives me about 145MB/s and my internal SSD is about 700MB/s.
You didn't give what you are getting from your current NAS right now so I don't know if this will improve you speed, but you did say it's like a USB2 and that generally ran about 30-35MB/s

 

Seagate didn't acquire WDC.

I am currently running WD's My Book Pro 16TB.

 

If you're running it in raid 1 (which you should) then you cannot mix sizes. And almost everyone I've read reccomend not mixing and matching different harddrives from different brands. Honestly 4 bays is crazy overkill, the odds of one harddrive failing are fairly low, the odds of TWO harddrives failing at the same time? The only way that's going to happen is because of extreme user error, like dropping the whole unit in the tub. There's such thing as being safe and then there's just crazy overkill and your money could be better spent elsewhere (example, instead of getting a 4 drive bay and getting cheapy harddrives, get a 2 drive bay and get some server quality drives. Just makes more sense for you my friend)