Best thunderbolt 3 raid

[Brian Merlen]

Hi,

I'm trying to decide between Areca, promise, and owc thunderbay four. The last one is software raid only. I believe the first two can do raid 6 and last one only raid 5. I'd prefer raid 6 for safety. I was thinking about using 6tb toshiba 7200rpm drives. What do you guys think?

My rMBP is about three years old and I'm trying to speed up my I/o in the hopes of it performing at top quality. Plus the drive will be useful for quite some time so I'll use tb2 adaptor until I upgrade

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The TB3 to TB2 adapter does not work that well connecting TB3 devices to older TB setups. You also need one of the later updates to macOS Sierra, which shouldn't be an issue, or High Sierra to make it work right. Things may have improved with the latest firmware, but I have not tried going that direction lately.

That said, the Promise Pgasus2 is pretty good, so is the ARECA ThunderRAID 2. These are the Thunderbolt 2 versions. There are a couple other options out there that are more robust and capable, like the QNAP units that have multiple Thunderbolt and 10GE connections so you can connect to multiple systems, but these units get very expensive in a hurry. These TB2 RAIDs are still relevant and perform great. I'm using a Pegasus2 R6 with 6x4TB HDDs connected to my iMac Pro. The TB3 to TB2 adapter works flawlessly for this and I still get max performance out of the unit as the drives are the bottleneck, not the TB2 interface. TB2 would become the bottleneck if I installed SSDs or had some of the newer and faster HDDs, especially if it were an 8 bay unit.

The newer TB3 units from Promise and ARECA are more capable and refined. For example, the Promise TB2 and TB1 units had a lot of issues with going to sleep and staying asleep. I have a an ARECA 8-Bay TB3 RAID and really like it a lot -- prefer it to Promise.

 

[Misha Engel]

This might help

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/areca-arc-8050t3-thunderbolt-3-das,5376.html

 

[Marc Wielage]

You should also look at the TB3 drives from G-Tech, which are very good.

What specific speeds are you looking for? Once you get past 800MBp/s, you can easily handle 4K sessions with no problem. The hangups often work out to processing speed issues, not drive i/o per se.

 

[Blair Thornton]

I absolutely love my AKiTiO Thunder3 Quad Mini https://www.akitio.com/portable-storage/akitio-thunder3-quad-mini

but now I would get an OWC ThunderBlade V4 https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-thunderblade-v4 for it's sheer performance.

p.s. I have had zero issues with the Apple TB3 to TBb2 adapter with both TB2 and TB drives, however it gets hot over time. You need to seriously consider a newer MacBook Pro with TB3 if looking at Thunderbolt3 external cases.

 

[Tim Gerhard]

To my knowledge, Areca has end of lifed their Thunderbolt 2 RAIDs. Intel kills off the chips really fast.... they've already taken some TB3 chipsets EoL.

 

[Misha Engel]

From the Areca website

http://www.areca.com.tw/products/thunderbolt3.htm

NOTE: Backward compatible with Thunderbolt 2 Macs using Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter

 

[Brian Merlen]

i typed a long reply but my browser reloaded sorry about it guys and appreciate your help! i plan to upgrade my machine at some point is why i figure TB3 works better? i can swap larger drives into my existing TB2 raid is another thought but scary given lack of backup and swath of content on the drive (bad practice but in theory i can reconcile anything id need from the cloud)? so i thought another raid isnt a bad idea to backup the first AND get a huge one since first ones very small raid. other idea im weighing is getting SSDs that are 1TB that can be used my by 7Q+ and use like one or two of them as my edit drive for small corporate gigs and still be able to make them dual use for 7Q+ if need be? im not really sure which way to go yet but editing on the drive the client gave me sucks atm in 4k in adobe premiere CC, so i know i need to do something to not go crazy here over my super laggy current drive and i cant even move my files to the raid my raid is so full...

 

[Tim Gerhard]

TB2 is probably being abandoned by all the manufacturers, so it's probably best to go with TB3 to future proof yourself a little bit.

 

[Phil Holland]

I've used the Lacie 6big series a healthy amount over the last year in particular.

I have a Thunderbay 4 from OWC coming into the lab this week. Should also be a good option.

Haven't spent much time with the G-Tech stuff, but it looks good as well.

 

[Nick Burridge]

Stardom does a bunch of TB3 kit (ranging from portable 2-bay caddies up to 8-bay rack RAIDs) - we haven't upgraded from their TB2 equivalents yet but have been very happy with their performance. Also recently bought a TB3 QNAP NAS after reading discussion in this thread.

As for drives we tend to go with Western Digital Red Pro drives.

 

[andrewhake]

The G-Tech Shuttle arrays are excellent build quality and the software is actually quite good as well.