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Storage Upgrade

m11rphy

m11rphy

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 26, 2009
642
372
I currently have of my movie rips on a external western digital my book, this had 2 3Gb western digital green drives and connects to my iMac via thunderbolt . This is now close to beeing full so I'm thinking of upgrades.

I have looked at the drobo 5D which also connects via thunderbolt, I was then hoping to use the 2 green drives plus 2 red drives then replace the green drives going forward. Is this possible or even the best way to ? I have looked at a Nas but my iMac is always on so thought a thunderbolt device was a good option
 
I don't care about a NAS with less than 10GbE interface and an adapter for the Mac would be too expensive. Plus, it is another complex system in the network. Buy a relatively inexpensive Thunderbolt 1 hardware RAID enclosure with basic management software, and get some good and fast enough drives for it depending on the level which are recent releases and somewhat guaranteed to be found in the market still in some years when you want to upgrade. 2 now, 3, 4 later. Note that with the cheapest enclosures you will need to copy the volume then to rebuild because it is not possible to add capacity to the array, only spares at best. The Drobo way, I have no experience with.
 
- 2 drives in RAID0: fast but unsafe for 2x capacity
- 4 drives in RAID10: fast, 2x capacity, if 2 drives on one side fail you're ok, but the same stripe in each you're doomed
- 3 drives in RAID5; 2x capacity, not very fast, 1 drive failure can be OK (big drive issue nowadays), but 2 you're doomed.

I'm not sure if the one without 5 has management software.
But I'm not sure this RAID5 is in hardware.

There are other relatively inexpensive enclosures that I prefer, even if Thunderbolt 1. I don't find OWC to be the Mac goto place for Thunderbolt enclosures as for other things.
 
m11rphy said:
That was the other option was looking at, why is this better than the drobo ?
Click to expand...
I've read too many instances where people have lost data with Drobos for me to trust them for my data. I prefer the simplicity of the OWC solution.

m11rphy said:
Would I need to get all the drives at one ?
Click to expand...

Yes.

m11rphy said:
I see there are 2 versions why is the one that does raid 5 better
Click to expand...

RAID5 offers some redundancy should one of the four drives fail. You can put a fresh drive in to replace the dead one, and it will rebuild. RAID5 is not perfect, but it's better than no redundancy at all. If you want even greater redundancy you're looking at much more expensive solutions from companies like Areca or Promise.
 
If Thunderbolt is a requirement for you, I would go with the Drobo. I used older models of Drobos for years and never lost any data to them. I used the ability to upgraded capacity by swapping out larger drives many times and went all the way up to 8TB drives before I switched to an 8 drive NAS.

The ability to increase capacity is such a fantastic feature. I would never consider a storage device that doesn't have it.
 
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