Multiple drives and the new Mac Pro

[Shooshie]

you'd be solving a problem that no longer exists at the cost of losing the whole volume if one physical disk fails. Unless you plan to do full def video work on the same array, JBOD is best.

He's right. RAIDs were mind-blowing tech about 15 years ago. Apple included the ability to make RAIDs right in the OS. But the chance of failure gets multiplied by the number of drives you have. Without expensive and complex software/hardware combinations that automatically replace a failed drive without a hiccough, RAIDs are speed-demons that almost guarantee the early demise of your drive and data. They were great for high-speed applications like web-hosting, where a slower, more reliable drive maintained the backup for when the fast servers died.

Think of it; if one out of six drives fail within a certain time period, a six-drive RAID is virtually assured of failing within that same time period. (ok, that's a logical fallacy, but mathematically those odds are real)

But for personal use, a 10,000 rpm drive like the SATA Velociraptor is probably faster than most RAIDs, with far greater reliability. Those didn't exist in the heyday of RAID tech. There may still be a great demand for RAIDs, but my experience with them only cemented my resolve never to touch another one. (all three failed within a year of their deployment) Those big drive enclosures with 6 drives are best, IMO, as JBODs.

Shooshie

[BKK-OZ]

I'm not sure where you are coming from - if one of my disks (platters) fails, I can replace it and the data will be rebuilt via the in-built RAID redundancy, I won't lose my whole array. If two drives fail... well then there is more of a problem, but not just if one out the four goes.

[jloeb]

So it reduces the capacity of the volume to maintain redundancy. Which RAID protocol are you using?

If you're doing video on it, you may really need it. It's fine, it just won't gain you any performance for your DAW/VI work and may slightly reduce consistency of performance there at the margins, but certainly it's not going to break your system. For video it's great.

[BKK-OZ]

4 x Toshiba DTO1ACA2 (2Tb each) as a RAID 5 array, set up using the Pegasus Promise RAID utility. Plenty snappy, plenty redundant, plenty big. Nice pretty blue lights too.

[Shooshie]

I'm not sure where you are coming from - if one of my disks (platters) fails, I can replace it and the data will be rebuilt via the in-built RAID redundancy, I won't lose my whole array. If two drives fail... well then there is more of a problem, but not just if one out the four goes.

You will recall that I said "without expensive and complex software/hardware combinations that automatically replace a failed drive without a hiccough, RAIDs are speed-demons that almost guarantee the early demise of your drive and data."

I don't know the history of RAID, but I do know that it was only about 8 years ago that my son went to work for HP programming the stuff that does the redundancy and automatic restoration of dead drives, allowing for hot-swapping without a hitch. That was the big thing, then. Before that kind of software/hardware solution became available, RAIDs were just a bunch of drives acting like one, and if one failed, they all failed.

Where I'm coming from, personally, is a stack of RAID drives that failed in less than a year apiece. That was a very frustrating period in which I lost a lot of huge projects that I had been working on for a long time. Long story, not worth repeating, but I've learned that simple is reliable is best. If you want to spend the bucks for a fully backed-up, fully redundant, fully hot-swappable auto-restoring RAID outfit, then that's great. But if you need terabytes of storage, and you need it backed up (doubling or tripling your capacity requirements), the simple solution of buying a stack of 2TB My Passport Drives is hard to beat.

Shoosh

[HCMarkus]

Shooshie, I hope you have experienced the joy of solid state hard drives. I loved my Raptors, but SSDs leave those babies in the DUST. I expect the only drives I buy in the future that are not SSDs will be big, fat external Backup/Time Machine drives.

[BKK-OZ]

If you want to spend the bucks for a fully backed-up, fully redundant, fully hot-swappable auto-restoring RAID outfit, then that's great. But if you need terabytes of storage, and you need it backed up (doubling or tripling your capacity requirements), the simple solution of buying a stack of 2TB My Passport Drives is hard to beat.

Shoosh

Well, the R4 (my mistake for calling it an R2 earlier) was (I think, can't remember for sure) around $600. Add to that the drives (which cost less than your approach) and I have a highly available, highly resilient, and very fast 8Tb array running over TB.

Edit: the capacity is actually around 6Tb after the RAID is applied.

So for what I've got, the cost seems worth the benefit.

You have to remember too that the new MPs do not come with any kind of drive enclosure, so no matter what, you are going to have to buy something to put your drives in, if you end up going with a new MP.

Plus, its got them pretty blue lights.

[Shooshie]

Shooshie, I hope you have experienced the joy of solid state hard drives. I loved my Raptors, but SSDs leave those babies in the DUST. I expect the only drives I buy in the future that are not SSDs will be big, fat external Backup/Time Machine drives.

Have they solved the problem of diminishing capacity over time? I'm waiting for that before I invest a lot in them. If they've done that already, then I'll start getting into it.

Shooshie

[HCMarkus]

Shooshie, I hope you have experienced the joy of solid state hard drives. I loved my Raptors, but SSDs leave those babies in the DUST. I expect the only drives I buy in the future that are not SSDs will be big, fat external Backup/Time Machine drives.

Have they solved the problem of diminishing capacity over time? I'm waiting for that before I invest a lot in them. If they've done that already, then I'll start getting into it.

Shooshie

Get into it Shoosh! "Trim" is the command that keeps SSDs refreshed, and endurance is only an issue in enterprise environments where 100s of GBs of data is written every day. Try one, like a Samsung Evo or Crucial M100, for your boot drive... just set in in the optical bay in your MP and connect to the extra SATA/Power cable there. Even though you will be running at SATA II not SATA III speeds (which, btw, is no big deal for boot drives because OS does not stream lengthy files, it's all small file i/o), I guarantee you'll like it!

[mikehalloran]

Have they solved the problem of diminishing capacity over time?

Trim, as mentioned, lets the OS dump and overwrite old data on an SSD. So far, it only works over SATA, eSATA and PCIe. On non-Apple SSDs, it must be enabled by a Terminal hack or one of the many utilities for the use.

Trim is also supported on PCIe and eSATA devices connected via Thunderbolt such as a blades on a PCIe expansion chassis. This should include drives connected via eSATA cards on the same chassis but I have not seen where someone has done that. The LaCie TB-eSATA dock should support it also but I've not read that it's being done.

Although rumors persist that it may be possible to enable Trim on SSDs via TB, all I have read is wishful thinking on the subject. If anyone can confirm that it's doable, let's see the link with instructions.

It will not work over USB 3. That has been widely reported.

[Shooshie]

This is kind of obliquely related, so I'll ask here, and maybe one of you guys knows the answer:
If I got a Solid State Drive of 1TB to match my 1TB Velociraptor, then if I copied the Raptor to the SSD, verbatim, renaming the SSD with the Raptor's name, and then stuck it in the Raptor's SATA slot in my Mac Pro, would my library authorizations like VSL work without having to do anything? I'm basically talking about cloning the drive, but not with CCC; just by copying it over.

Does that sound doable? Or am I going to have to reinstall all that stuff? I think it's all working off dongles, so I guess the authorization isn't a problem. The real question is whether the plugins will find their libraries, and that sort of thing.

I don't like to clone drives using CCC when they are as big as these. You take a 2TB drive and decide you're going to make a disk image... to what? It takes three 2TB drives to make a disk image and clone to another drive... unless you all know something I don't.

Shoosh

[HCMarkus]

I'm going to defer to Mr. Halloran on your question Shooshie, but will point out that you can, using CCC or Super Duper, clone one drive to another without making a disc image first. So as long as the new drive can hold all of the old drive's data, you should be OK.

One of the Mikes (I'm thinking Drs. Halloran or MLC) may inform us about "restoring" to the new drive from Time Machine...

One thing about SSDs (like HDs)… it is good to not fill them to the brim. You can guarantee some spare area is always retained by creating a small partition on the SSD (using Apple's Disk Utility) that is never written to.

Trim Enabler is a Free (or $10 donation) application created by Cindori that will enable Trim on non-Apple OEM SSDs. It has worked very well for me and many others. As Mike note, the SSDs must be connected via an interface that passes Trim commands, like SATA ports.

[Shooshie]

Thanks! That's good news about CCC being able to copy from one disk to another, directly. I think I remember that, now. It's been a while.

Shoosh

[mikehalloran]

A few authorizations will not work-- internet auths for MasterWriter and FinalDraft come to mind. Those should be de authorized before you make the swap. I've never had luck with DP before 8 but that's no longer an issue.

Otherwise, most should work like Finale, iLok and all disk based authorizations. I recently did something similar and my Izotope verifications survived.

I used the cloner in TechToolPro 7. I prefer commercially supported apps.

[frankf]

When I went to SSD boot drive on my Mac Pro, I restored from a Super Duper clone. There may have been a couple of reauthorizations I had to do but so few I can't remember which apps.


Frank Ferrucci