A large raid can max out on bandwidth via the use of HDDs
Not with only 4 drives though. The buss can handle more data than 4 hard drives can deliver. Using faster drives will be an improvement so using SSDs would be better than spinning drives because they're faster.
To start off, are you familiar with the difference between software and hardware based raid systems?
I'm not sure which units you're thinking about, but theLaCie 4Big units have hardware controllers on board.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hmm
There are further differences in that some controllers are far more robust than others.
In what way? What advantages does one controller have over another? What benefit might one offer as compared to another? What might an inferior controller do more poorly than a good one?
I'm not sure which units you're thinking about, but theLaCie 4Big units have hardware controllers on board.
I'm probably biased. My luck hasn't been very good with anything bearing the Lacie name. It's probably my memory of firewire drives with burnt out bridgeports.
Quote:
In what way? What advantages does one controller have over another? What benefit might one offer as compared to another? What might an inferior controller do more poorly than a good one?
Unfortunately I don't have a good link for you on this one, but reliability does vary among raid systems, as does price. Some are more likely to recover in the case of a rebuild. Any decent hardware raid uses ECC ram, especially if it supports any raid type involving parity.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lorin Schultz
Not with only 4 drives though. The buss can handle more data than 4 hard drives can deliver. Using faster drives will be an improvement so using SSDs would be better than spinning drives because they're faster.
That is a fair point, but there are also other thunderbolt raid solutions. I would probably go with an 8 bay and HDDs over 4 bay and SSDs under most circumstances, but that is me. Areca is nice, but the newest one is somewhat expensive. It went up by $300.
Thanks for your reply. I guess I was thinking of just using this as a simple drive with duplicate backup copy. (Raid 1 I guess)
Right now I have 12 4TB OWC drives with a drive and backup copy of it for all my video work but I need to go to something better. I suppose I need to research more...Thanks for any info!
I missed this before. I wanted to mention that Raid 1 is not exactly a backup. It provides some fault tolerance, but it doesn't negate the need for a real backup. There is still the possibility of corruption or failure to rebuild. Raid 3/5 variants are most sensitive to that because a single error can cause the rebuild to fail.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lorin Schultz
In retrospect I kinda wish I'd saved up enough scheckles for an 8-bay unit. Using RAID 10 with a 4-bay means I only get the speed of two drives.
Yeah I get that, although you would think sequential reading would be faster.
I didn't look beyond the current shipping LaCie thunderbolt offerings. The comparison is a Thunderbolt 2 to the 245 MB/s USB 3.0 offering?
Yes, the one in the link I provided... note the built-in controller, as already discussed earlier in the thread, and the POINT, which is not that USB3 is pound-for-pound equivalent to Thunderbolt, but that the cost difference is so great as to possibly be a deal-breaker. Obviously TB is better than USB3. The question I'm asking is whether it's worth twice as much for a 4-drive unit?
Waiting for this model and several others to actually go on sale...
I have two WDC Thunderbolt drives but for some reason (they blame OSX) they won't spin down when ejected Rather, you have to wait for the HD itself to spin down which can take 20-30 minutes... The WDC USB drive I have spins down immediately. They say it is an Apple problem with TB?
I didn't realise they weren't spinning down and blew four drives in a little over a year...
I had LaCies years ago and they ran super hot (I do live in a hot, humid area but recently keep my office controlled). Otherwise, they worked well. The new 2big TB2 looks interesting.
These G drives look the part for the nMP!
Would you guys recommend G or LaCie? Dual drive, 4~6TB.
I have two WDC Thunderbolt drives but for some reason (they blame OSX) they won't spin down when ejected Rather, you have to wait for the HD itself to spin down which can take 20-30 minutes... The WDC USB drive I have spins down immediately. They say it is an Apple problem with TB?
I didn't realise they weren't spinning down and blew four drives in a little over a year...
If they are encrypted, they don't spin down for some reason but it could also be down to the drive models not responding properly to the eject. OS X should sleep the drive automatically after a certain amount of idle time though and you can set this yourself in the terminal:
sudo pmset -a disksleep 1
This sets the drive spin down to the lowest setting of 1 minute - in system prefs > energy saver, the checkbox to sleep the drives sets this but the default is 10 minutes I think. It doesn't always take a full minute with the above setting. You can then set it back up to a higher amount after eject to prevent the drives spinning down when they are attached or even 0.
Would you guys recommend G or LaCie? Dual drive, 4~6TB.
A few people have mentioned LaCie power supply failures. I've experienced 1 power supply failure with a LaCie and they can get hot as they tend to not use a fan. G-tech is owned by Western Digital. LaCie is owned by Seagate now.
You can get bad drives from any of them. Both G-tech and LaCie drives can be opened up for servicing and both are stylish enough. The g-tech ones look like they are designed to be used with the Mac Pro:
A few people have mentioned LaCie power supply failures. I've experienced 1 power supply failure with a LaCie
I've had two LaCie power supply failures. That's over a period of eight years or so, but then I've only owned eight LaCie drives in that time. I can't decide whether two failures in eight years is not bad, or if I should interpret it as a 25% failure rate.
When shopping for a RAID last year I asked LaCie why they insist on using those damn annoying line-lump AC adapters instead of a built-in power supply. Their response was that the power supply is the most common failure point and not having it built-in means users don't have to ship the whole unit in for repair. I followed up by suggesting that rather than focussing on how to make repairs easier they could concentrate on providing better power supplies. They didn't respond to that.
Comments
A large raid can max out on bandwidth via the use of HDDs
Not with only 4 drives though. The buss can handle more data than 4 hard drives can deliver. Using faster drives will be an improvement so using SSDs would be better than spinning drives because they're faster.
I'm not sure which units you're thinking about, but the LaCie 4Big units have hardware controllers on board.
In what way? What advantages does one controller have over another? What benefit might one offer as compared to another? What might an inferior controller do more poorly than a good one?
I'm not sure which units you're thinking about, but the LaCie 4Big units have hardware controllers on board.
I'm probably biased. My luck hasn't been very good with anything bearing the Lacie name. It's probably my memory of firewire drives with burnt out bridgeports.
Quote:
In what way? What advantages does one controller have over another? What benefit might one offer as compared to another? What might an inferior controller do more poorly than a good one?
Unfortunately I don't have a good link for you on this one, but reliability does vary among raid systems, as does price. Some are more likely to recover in the case of a rebuild. Any decent hardware raid uses ECC ram, especially if it supports any raid type involving parity.
Not with only 4 drives though. The buss can handle more data than 4 hard drives can deliver. Using faster drives will be an improvement so using SSDs would be better than spinning drives because they're faster.
That is a fair point, but there are also other thunderbolt raid solutions. I would probably go with an 8 bay and HDDs over 4 bay and SSDs under most circumstances, but that is me. Areca is nice, but the newest one is somewhat expensive. It went up by $300.
In retrospect I kinda wish I'd saved up enough scheckles for an 8-bay unit. Using RAID 10 with a 4-bay means I only get the speed of two drives.
I didn't look beyond the current shipping LaCie thunderbolt offerings. The comparison is a Thunderbolt 2 to the 245 MB/s USB 3.0 offering?
Thanks for your reply. I guess I was thinking of just using this as a simple drive with duplicate backup copy. (Raid 1 I guess)
Right now I have 12 4TB OWC drives with a drive and backup copy of it for all my video work but I need to go to something better. I suppose I need to research more...Thanks for any info!
I missed this before. I wanted to mention that Raid 1 is not exactly a backup. It provides some fault tolerance, but it doesn't negate the need for a real backup. There is still the possibility of corruption or failure to rebuild. Raid 3/5 variants are most sensitive to that because a single error can cause the rebuild to fail.
In retrospect I kinda wish I'd saved up enough scheckles for an 8-bay unit. Using RAID 10 with a 4-bay means I only get the speed of two drives.
Yeah I get that, although you would think sequential reading would be faster.
I didn't look beyond the current shipping LaCie thunderbolt offerings. The comparison is a Thunderbolt 2 to the 245 MB/s USB 3.0 offering?
Yes, the one in the link I provided... note the built-in controller, as already discussed earlier in the thread, and the POINT, which is not that USB3 is pound-for-pound equivalent to Thunderbolt, but that the cost difference is so great as to possibly be a deal-breaker. Obviously TB is better than USB3. The question I'm asking is whether it's worth twice as much for a 4-drive unit?
Waiting for this model and several others to actually go on sale...
I have two WDC Thunderbolt drives but for some reason (they blame OSX) they won't spin down when ejected Rather, you have to wait for the HD itself to spin down which can take 20-30 minutes... The WDC USB drive I have spins down immediately. They say it is an Apple problem with TB?
I didn't realise they weren't spinning down and blew four drives in a little over a year...
I had LaCies years ago and they ran super hot (I do live in a hot, humid area but recently keep my office controlled). Otherwise, they worked well. The new 2big TB2 looks interesting.
These G drives look the part for the nMP!
Would you guys recommend G or LaCie? Dual drive, 4~6TB.
If they are encrypted, they don't spin down for some reason but it could also be down to the drive models not responding properly to the eject. OS X should sleep the drive automatically after a certain amount of idle time though and you can set this yourself in the terminal:
sudo pmset -a disksleep 1
This sets the drive spin down to the lowest setting of 1 minute - in system prefs > energy saver, the checkbox to sleep the drives sets this but the default is 10 minutes I think. It doesn't always take a full minute with the above setting. You can then set it back up to a higher amount after eject to prevent the drives spinning down when they are attached or even 0.
A few people have mentioned LaCie power supply failures. I've experienced 1 power supply failure with a LaCie and they can get hot as they tend to not use a fan. G-tech is owned by Western Digital. LaCie is owned by Seagate now.
There's only a handful left:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers
You can get bad drives from any of them. Both G-tech and LaCie drives can be opened up for servicing and both are stylish enough. The g-tech ones look like they are designed to be used with the Mac Pro:
[VIDEO]
The Lacie ones are still silver.
A few people have mentioned LaCie power supply failures. I've experienced 1 power supply failure with a LaCie
I've had two LaCie power supply failures. That's over a period of eight years or so, but then I've only owned eight LaCie drives in that time. I can't decide whether two failures in eight years is not bad, or if I should interpret it as a 25% failure rate.
When shopping for a RAID last year I asked LaCie why they insist on using those damn annoying line-lump AC adapters instead of a built-in power supply. Their response was that the power supply is the most common failure point and not having it built-in means users don't have to ship the whole unit in for repair. I followed up by suggesting that rather than focussing on how to make repairs easier they could concentrate on providing better power supplies. They didn't respond to that.
Thanks as always, Marvin.