Mark K.
Well-known member
Hey guys,
Just wanting to pick some of your wonderful brains further on the best way to set up storage with my new (to me) Mac Pro 5,1
Currently I've got a 250GB SSD boot drive in one of the optical bays, and four big (and mostly full) individual SATA drives in the internal bays (just storing a bunch of old projects); I also have two 1.92TB Samsung PM863 Enterprise SSDs on the way, that will live on a Sonnet Tempo Pro SSD PCIe Card in RAID 0 for a 4TB scratch drive (to handle cacheing duties and hold the raw files of whatever current project I'm working on).
My basic strategy is to have my data tiered, so that anything reasonably recent, can be accessed reasonably quickly from a RAID 5. What that means is that I'll have the following basic system:
- Backup Storage (copies of everything on individual harddrives, stored away - at least until I can afford an LTO drive and back things up that way)
- Near Storage (a moderately fast RAID 5 setup that's big enough to hold a bunch of recent projects, so that they can be brought online to the scratch disk quickly, while still offering some basic redundancy)
- Scratch Drive (a 1000MB/s SSD RAID for cache files and the project files of the specific project I'm working on at that moment)
- Boot Drive (an SSD boot drive with nothing but the OS and Applications on it)
Most of that is simple enough, the one area I’d like some advice on is the ‘Near Storage’ component of it. I’m wondering whether I’d do better to put four big 6TB drives in the internal bays of the Mac Pro, and have them in a RAID 5 setup using Softraid? Or whether I should get an external 4-bay enclosure, and setup them up as a RAID 5 in that, and connect the external RAID via the eSATA ports on the Sonnet Tempo card?
Basically, I’m wondering whether there would be a speed penalty to having the RAID 5 in the internal drive bays (which are only SATAII) compared to an external unit using eSATA (that’s running through a PCIe port)? And would a four-drive RAID 5 even be able to max out the speed potential of SATAII? (if not, I’d prefer to have the ‘near’ storage, in the actual computer case itself).
Also, all four of my PCIe ports are filled now (Titan X, Decklink 4k, Sonnet USB3, Sonnet Tempo), and I don’t want to the added complexity of adding a PCIe expansion case at this stage just to add a hardware RAID controller.
Any help or advice would be much appreciated!
Cheers,
Mark
Just wanting to pick some of your wonderful brains further on the best way to set up storage with my new (to me) Mac Pro 5,1
Currently I've got a 250GB SSD boot drive in one of the optical bays, and four big (and mostly full) individual SATA drives in the internal bays (just storing a bunch of old projects); I also have two 1.92TB Samsung PM863 Enterprise SSDs on the way, that will live on a Sonnet Tempo Pro SSD PCIe Card in RAID 0 for a 4TB scratch drive (to handle cacheing duties and hold the raw files of whatever current project I'm working on).
My basic strategy is to have my data tiered, so that anything reasonably recent, can be accessed reasonably quickly from a RAID 5. What that means is that I'll have the following basic system:
- Backup Storage (copies of everything on individual harddrives, stored away - at least until I can afford an LTO drive and back things up that way)
- Near Storage (a moderately fast RAID 5 setup that's big enough to hold a bunch of recent projects, so that they can be brought online to the scratch disk quickly, while still offering some basic redundancy)
- Scratch Drive (a 1000MB/s SSD RAID for cache files and the project files of the specific project I'm working on at that moment)
- Boot Drive (an SSD boot drive with nothing but the OS and Applications on it)
Most of that is simple enough, the one area I’d like some advice on is the ‘Near Storage’ component of it. I’m wondering whether I’d do better to put four big 6TB drives in the internal bays of the Mac Pro, and have them in a RAID 5 setup using Softraid? Or whether I should get an external 4-bay enclosure, and setup them up as a RAID 5 in that, and connect the external RAID via the eSATA ports on the Sonnet Tempo card?
Basically, I’m wondering whether there would be a speed penalty to having the RAID 5 in the internal drive bays (which are only SATAII) compared to an external unit using eSATA (that’s running through a PCIe port)? And would a four-drive RAID 5 even be able to max out the speed potential of SATAII? (if not, I’d prefer to have the ‘near’ storage, in the actual computer case itself).
Also, all four of my PCIe ports are filled now (Titan X, Decklink 4k, Sonnet USB3, Sonnet Tempo), and I don’t want to the added complexity of adding a PCIe expansion case at this stage just to add a hardware RAID controller.
Any help or advice would be much appreciated!
Cheers,
Mark
