Two drive RAID enclosure, Thunderbolt?

[dingobiatch]

Looking to buy a two drive RAID enclosure that is Thunderbolt for my new Mac Pro (would be putting two Samsung 840 1TB SSD's in it)....

I can't seem to find anything that isn't a four or more drive bay, or that has drives already in it..

 

[MCAsan]

You can do a dual port dock and the SSD in it.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115141


And there is the OWC Drobo

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Data Robotics, Inc./DRMINI1A21/

 

[hfg]

Looking to buy a two drive RAID enclosure that is Thunderbolt for my new Mac Pro (would be putting two Samsung 840 1TB SSD's in it)....

I can't seem to find anything that isn't a four or more drive bay, or that has drives already in it..

I use a refurbished LaCie "Little Big Disk" Thunderbolt from MacMall ... I removed the original hard disks and replaced them with SSDs. You can sell or use the hard disks you remove.

A bit more $$$, there is the Akitio Neutrino Thunder Duo Enclosure which works well.

http://www.akitio.com/portable-storage/neutrino-thunder-duo

These both use Apple software RAID.

 

[dingobiatch]

Is it possible to use a Drobo mini in a configuration with three drives, where two drives are RAID0, and one drive is by itself?

 

[opinio]

Does it have to be 2.5"?

If not, this:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/External-Drive/OWC/Elite-Dual-RAID

with two of these:

http://eshop.macsales.com/owcpages/multimount/

 

[xraydoc]

http://www.monoprice.com/Product?ab...onoprice.com/Search/Index?keyword=thunderbolt

I have one of these with two 250GB Samsung 840 EVOs. Works very, very well. Virtually silent (very small cooling fan). Comes with a .5m Thunderbolt cable.

I get 570MB/sec write and 650MB/sec read per Blackmagic disk benchmark.

It's the same as the Akitio drive linked above

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Is it possible to use a Drobo mini in a configuration with three drives, where two drives are RAID0, and one drive is by itself?

No. Drobo uses all drives without configuration options.

 

[Chuck Rodent]

Some stores are clearing out the WD My Book Duo Thunderbolt. I picked up a 4 GB (2 X 2 TB WD Green drives) for $269. The box can be set up as JBOD, Raid 1 or Raid 0. Everything is functioning fine though the drives are the slowest in the read/write chain. Likely I will replace the drives in a few years with 4TB WD Red drives.

 

[dingobiatch]

http://www.monoprice.com/Product?ab...onoprice.com/Search/Index?keyword=thunderbolt

I have one of these with two 250GB Samsung 840 EVOs. Works very, very well. Virtually silent (very small cooling fan). Comes with a .5m Thunderbolt cable.

I get 570MB/sec write and 650MB/sec read per Blackmagic disk benchmark.

It's the same as the Akitio drive linked above

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No. Drobo uses all drives without configuration options.

Shouldn't you be getting significantly higher write and read than that? I thought the Samsung 840 EVO drives had read/writes of ~500 with just a single one... in RAID0, it should be running almost twice the speed, no?

 

[xraydoc]

Shouldn't you be getting significantly higher write and read than that? I thought the Samsung 840 EVO drives had read/writes of ~500 with just a single one... in RAID0, it should be running almost twice the speed, no?

I was getting 750MB/sec when I had them set up as a two-channel USB 3.0 RAID. I think this enclosure isn't the fastest possible, but it's inexpensive.

Plus the EVO RAID is about 50% full.

And the drive is on a Thunderbolt bus with several other drives. And my machine only has TB1, not TB2.

 

[dingobiatch]

I was getting 750MB/sec when I had them set up as a two-channel USB 3.0 RAID. I think this enclosure isn't the fastest possible, but it's inexpensive.

Plus the EVO RAID is about 50% full.

And the drive is on a Thunderbolt bus with several other drives. And my machine only has TB1, not TB2.

Wait. You are using it as USB3 or Thunderbolt? And when you said the original 570/650 numbers, was that RAID0?

 

[xraydoc]

Wait. You are using it as USB3 or Thunderbolt? And when you said the original 570/650 numbers, was that RAID0?

Before I got the TB enclosure, I was using each 840 EVO in a separate USB3 enclosure tied together in a RAID 0 (each drive on its own USB3 bus). That got something like 750MB/sec or so (don't recall exact numbers off hand and I'm not home to look them up). Very fast. USB3 is a pretty impressive protocol.

Then I got the TB enclosure I linked above and popped the two drives in to it. At first I was getting the 570/650 numbers I reported, but subsequently it's been benchmarking at around 650 write and 715 read - so much, much better. I think perhaps I benchmarked it at first with some other activity on the same TB bus that I didn't notice was occurring.

The Monoprice/Akitio enclosure is TB-only (though does have two ports so you can daisy chain off it).