Question about RAID drives...

[muxlow]

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, my 2tb studio work drive stopped mounting. Thankfully I have Blackblaze and all my data is safe. I ordered a restore drive and it arrived yesterday. Praise for Backblaze.

>>> After the panic subsided, I bought a Glyph 2-disk external drive and set it up as a mirrored RAID (2x8tb drives).

>>> I also have an 8tb single external drive that I've been using for TimeMachine (but it had been offline forever).

>>> The RAID drive is a bit noisy. The TimeMachine drive is a bit old.

Here's my conundrum: Would you...

• Replace my dead work drive with the RAID?

• Use the RAID for TimeMachine, and the current/old TimeMachine drive as the new work drive?

• Switch the RAID to JBOD and make each a disk TimeMachine drive? (just read TM on RAIDs can be problematic)

• Eschew TimeMachine altogether and just use the RAID as a manual backup?

• Something else?

I don't know if there's a right answer, but some input / best practices / brainstorming would be helpful. Thanks!

[HCMarkus]

I'd say use the RAID drives for TM, setting them up as two independent JBOD drives, each a separate TM volume which is written to alternately. If the noise is an issue, turn off TM while working and turn it on overnight. You can also partition (or create volumes if formatted APFS) the 8TB drives to leave room for direct backups from your work drive.

Then, for your work drive, pick up a 2TB SSD of some sort or another and enjoy blazing fast (and silent) project load speeds. Many choices now, the least expensive some sort of USB SATA drive, like this (currently) $70 model:

https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-2TB-Port ... r=8-3&th=1

Only caveat, which is not huge, would be to, on occasion after a lot of write activity, reformat the SSD (after backing up, of course, perhaps to a partition/volume on one of your Glyph drives as mentioned above), as Macs do not support Trim via USB. Especially if you notice the SDS slowing down. Again, not a huge deal, but simply good housekeeping.

[muxlow]

Thank you Markus, that's where my head started going this morning (use the RAID for backup). Appreciate the confirmation.

I'll probably use the big 8tb HDD for the time being but appreciate the SSD advantages. And it's amazing how cheap drives are now.

[mikehalloran]

I don't care how many state that software "solutions" such as OWC's SoftRaid work. Too many have problems.

RAID 0 works great for Time Machine as long is a) the firmware of the box supports both and b) you have multiple backups since the failure of one drive means the loss of the entire backup. WD and Synology both have NAS boxes over Ethernet — I've been using WD for years. I had a support issue with them that was resolved two days ago over the phone and I now plan to order a third. The issue: How do I administer more than one through a browser dashboard? The answer is that each requires its own Admin tab in your browser, here's how to do it. I'm good with that.

Otherwise, you want JBOD as Mr. Marcus suggests.

Synology has boxes that support versions of RAID (SHR and SHR2) where, when a drive goes down, it's taken out of service and you are notified to replace it—then it rebuilds automatically. Here's the calculator — select the number of drives and size, select RAID type and see how many you need. I selected four 12TB drives for this example, comparing RAID 0 with SHR2.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/ ... _0%7CSHR_1

My Apple Engineer son-in-law has a 4-bay Synology box and loves SHR. As I have two WD boxes set up RAID 0 already plus spare drives and only need a third, I am passing on Synology for now.

As I've posted recently, I prefer WD Red+ CMR drives because, at 5400 RPM, they run cooler and they are quieter. Running RAID 0 nearly doubles the speed anyway so that's not a concern. Although I have the entire house wired for Ethernet, it wasn't till recently when my daughter moved out that I have an empty room for these so noise (or the lack of it) has been important.

This is my enclosure of choice these days. If I didn't have others, I'd give a 4-bay Synology a try since they have boxes that support 10GB Ethernet and WD doesn't (but speed is not my driving force here). https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01AW ... =UTF8&th=1

Both Synology and WD let you set up a NAS Volume plus another for Time Machine. You can two Volumes as JBOD in the same enclosure, only one can be Time Machine (although I have set up 2 TM Volumes in the past on a WD MyCloud Mirror, I was not able to duplicate that on the EX2 Ultra and WD can't understand how I did it on the Mirror).

[muxlow]

Thanks for the info, Mike -- much appreciated. I've been using WD drives (normal external drives) for years as well and haven't had any real issues until this latest debacle with a MyBook.

You mention software RAID. The Gylph drive is a single unit with its own RAID switches on the back. I assume this is a hardware RAID, and not a software RAID... right?

As for NAS, that's for another day. I have my hands full as it is

[HCMarkus]

As for NAS, that's for another day.

Especially if you are wanting to continue to use BackBlaze. Single computer only, no NAS allowed.

I've been using simple individual Seagate USB3 External drives for TM, long-term and archive storage for years. Currently have three on line at any one time. TM drives get rotated periodically.

Once you move to an SSD for your projects, you won't look back!

[muxlow]

FWIW, my praise of Backblaze has gone down quite a bit. I'm confident and grateful that my data is safe on their servers, but this is what's gone down since I ordered a restoration drive ($180) (bold for irritating stuff):

• Ordered the drive day before Thanksgiving; confirmation page mentioned watching for an email with updates — No email ever arrived

• No email or comms of any kind over the 4-day weekend

• Monday, I checked my account on the website, found My Restores, and saw that the drive was "being assembled"

• Drive shipped Tuesday and arrived Wednesday

• Drive was locked and required a code found in Backblaze.com > My Account > My Restores — The restore has been deleted from the list. There is a note that restores are deleted after 7 days, but they only shipped the drive 24 hrs ago

• Back and forth with help who required me to provide credit card info, a screenshot of my account, etc. Finally got the code Wednesday afternoon

• Unlocked the drive this morning and it has the wrong drive data on it. It's possible I checked the wrong box when I set. up the restore, but I don't think I did and since a) never confirmed anything in writing, and b) deleted any record of the request, I can't prove that I'm at fault

• Spent some time trying to piece the drive back together by assembling restores folder-by-folde and using Backblaze Downloader app (recommended on site). Every folder restore requires a reload of the UI, re-navigating to find where you were

• Backblaze Downloader downloaded the first restore .zip fine, but it quits on completion, requiring a restart, re-login, re-2-factor authentication and reselecting where you want the download to go. Madness.

• The second .zip downloaded only included a sub-sub-sub- folder of one of the two folders I slated for it. Can't trust any of it.

• Used chat to talk to rep who'd been helping me over email. A lot of copy/paste responses but finally recommended using Backblaze Restore. It isn't an option in the Backblaze prefs on my studio machine (macOS Ventura), but does show up on my office machine (Sonoma). This finally seems to be working but it's downloading files at 2.X mbps so it's gonna be a while.

• Edit: Backblaze Restore spent most of its time downloading ~250kbps, which would take nearly 1,000 hours to download a terabyte of data.

So the whole restoration process is just a mess. At least I'll only be out the cost of shipping the drive back to Backblaze, at which point I'll get my $180 back, but time is valuable too and this isn't how I wanted to spend the next week (downloading and doublechecking everything).

Ultimately, I'll have my data and it'll be fine, but any notion that Backblaze is a panacea and makes this easy has evaporated.

[mikehalloran]

As for NAS, that's for another day.

Especially if you are wanting to continue to use BackBlaze. Single computer only, no NAS allowed.

Not an issue. My sample drives are backed up on Backblaze and TimeMachine. Although TM sits in NAS boxes, they are not included in my plan (including NAS boxes is expensive and unnecessary for me).

…
Once you move to an SSD for your projects, you won't look back!

Amen to that.

[mikehalloran]

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, my 2tb studio work drive stopped mounting. Thankfully I have Blackblaze and all my data is safe. I ordered a restore drive and it arrived yesterday. Praise for Backblaze.

>>> After the panic subsided, I bought a Glyph 2-disk external drive and set it up as a mirrored RAID (2x8tb drives).

>>> I also have an 8tb single external drive that I've been using for TimeMachine (but it had been offline forever).

>>> The RAID drive is a bit noisy. The TimeMachine drive is a bit old.

Here's my conundrum: Would you...

• Eschew TimeMachine altogether and just use the RAID as a manual backup?

No!!!!!!

Read this thread.
viewtopic.php?t=64689

You may not need three TM backups like I have for the six or seven Macs we have in active use but you should have at least two. If configuring your Glyph RAID 1 (mirrored drives), there are your two backups. RAID 0 uses both drives as one Volume that's nearly double the size and almost twice as fast—downside is that, if one drive goes bad, your entire backup is lost. If you can configure JBOD with a TM Volume on each drive, that's better than R1 since each drive alternates hourly—less wear and tear and quieter.

My wife recently discovered that she'd lost an important file—could I find it on her Mac? After a couple hours searching, I discovered that she'd accidentally deleted it last June while trying to re-organize her client's files. All's well that ends well but after reading your experience, I'm sure glad that I didn't have to search Backblaze for it. Yikes!

Backblaze is that backup you hope that you never need. Even more so after your tale. I don't backup my backups since I have four, soon to be three TM units. Not all TM units back up all Macs but each Mac has at least two of the four. When I get my next RAID 0 box, then all seven will be backed up on each of the three Volumes. I plan to try a pair of 8TB SSDs in the next box.

I back up my desktops via Ethernet and all portables over WiFi.

The Gylph drive is a single unit with its own RAID switches on the back. I assume this is a hardware RAID, and not a software RAID... right?

Correct. It's reasonably priced — for Glyph, that's astonishing. The only downside for me is that the connection is over USB 3.0 (3.1 gen 2) which sometimes has wake from sleep issues. No thanks. If it had Ethernet or Thunderbolt, I'd give it a serious look.