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External storage solutions for new iMac?

Mark K.

Mark K.

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Hi guys,

Recently had my new iMac arrive, but I'm a bit stumped for what I can do on the external storage front for the new computer. I want a multi-drive enclosure (preferably for 4 drives or so). I want to take advantage of thunderbolt on the iMac, or USB3 at the very least - but I can't find any multi-bay enclosures that would fit the bill.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

Cheers,

Mark
 
Promise Pegasus R6
- 4 Drive and 6 Drive versions

Areca ThunderRAID (sold by several vendors, including MAXX DIGITAL).
- Holds 8 disks

MAXX Digital ThunderVault
- 4 disks, no RAID onboard, just JBOD (software RAID 0, 1, 10).

LaCie 5-Big Thunderbolt Edition
- 5 disks

Thunderbolt G-RAID
- 2 and 4 disk configurations


The Promise is the fastest and has proven very reliable. The Areca unit is built more rugged, performance isn't quite as good as the Promise. You can buy the Areca and LaCie units bare, Promise only sells with HDDs installed. LaCie's support is crap... The most expensive unit is the Areca one when bought from MAXX Digital with their label on it. They have awesome support and install the unit with top of the line enterprise class drives. Personally, I'd recommend the Promise unit. You can buy the Promise and LaCie from most big online stores like B&H, Adorama, etc..

That's pretty much all that's out there right now. There are a few other oddball units like the WD MyBook Duo Thunderbolt, you'll just have to google this stuff. Sorry for not providing direct links the ones I've listed are super easy to find. Tons of Thunderbolt stuff was shown last year at NAB and this year at CES, much of it has yet to hit the market for some odd reason. I think many manufacturers were waiting for Thunderbolt to go mainstream on PC systems, that's happening now.

There are pretty much no bare enclosures out there to buy with Thunderbolt, other than the LaCie and the Areca. It's really strange. Doesn't matter if you're looking for single drive, multi-drive, RAID, non-RAID... nothing out there. :(
 
pegasus R4 or R6...macmall has refurbs right now...i know i keep posting this, but it is a good deal on the best thunderbolt solution out there...they are not cheap and this deal makes it a little easier....i get around 600mb/s R/W with the 12TB R6 in a raid 5....so for the most part it is faster then my built in top of the line ssds....
 
The 4-drive RackRAID unit with USB3, eSATA.. looks nice and convenient. I guess I would just want to know what kind of performance it can deliver and what sort of monitoring and management tools it has. The big concern being its performance. USB3 is nice in theory, but it's a bloated specification layer atop an equally bloated layer atop the original USB standard. Very high overhead and industry-wide issues with compatibility when it comes to actual link speeds and meeting its full potential. You are going to get far better performance with the Areca or Promise Thunderbolt RAID units. Of course, the catch is they're expensive. As always, performance comes at a price...

MacGurus will answer your questions. I've bought from them in the past as well. Their HDD prices seem perfectly reasonable too if you order it all in one shot from them.
 
I didn't want to open a new topic, so I thought I ask it here:

I'm considering to buy a G-Raid USB3 drive, in Raid 0, for editing. I would store all of the raw footage on it and edit from it. But what happens if this drive fails? Or one of the drives inside it fails? Can I replace it? I have to send it back? Half of the data lost or all of it? Please enlighten me because I can't find any answer for this kinda important question.

(At the beginning, after I converted all of the footage to Prores 422, I would make a backup of these Prores files on a seperate drive. So in case of a failure I don't have to encode it again, just plug it in, locate the files in the editing program and I'm ready to go).
 
If a single drive fails within a Raid 0 setup, you will loose all the data in the array.
Some G-Raid units have user-replaceable drives, not sure about the one in question though.
 
As they write on their site, they are not user serviceable.... So what, after guarantee expires and one drives fails I have to throw it out?
 
By the way, which one is the faster (and with how much..) solution for video editing, color grading:

G-Raid , Raid 0 with USB 3
or
G-Drive with Thunderbolt
?
 
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