Fastest external working storage solution

Raymond Lin

Raymond Lin

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New iMac incoming in the new year and need to work out a storage solution. My current set up basically I store my photos on my external HD via USB 2.0 and back up over wifi to Drobo.

However it is not fast, not by any means as USB 2.0 is slow and the HD are also slow.

External SSD would be nice, and via Thunderbolt would be nippy but large size SSD is expensive.

I am looking at this..

http://store.apple.com/uk_edu_13309...lt-duo-dual-drive-storage-system?fnode=5f&p=3

If I use RAID 0, with Thunderbolt it should be quite fast?

If not, what other solution would you guys suggest?
 
I'm still largely undecided over thunderbolt, Sata drives come nowhere near the speed of thunderbolt. You'd be better off saving some cash and going esata/FireWire/usb3 in my opinion.

Oh and if you run raid0 please have a (preferably realtime) backup, due to the "one drive fails = bye bye data" nature of it. I know you do Raymond as you mention your on site backup, but for others reading this :)
 
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I've been looking at the USB 3.0 equivalent of that WD external hard drive for this very purpose on the iMac I have ordered. From what I have read a USB3 drive should be fast enough to allow photo editing etc.

Thunderbolt is twice the price of USB3 currently. Once thunderbolt is cheaper I will migrate the USB3 drive to my Time Machine back up to replace my current FW800 external drive.
 
I don't know how much speed you actually need, but as a general note a decent recent 7200rpm drive via USB3 will be very significantly faster (3x or so) than anything on USB2. Hard core video editing may require an SSD though...
 
The more I think about it, the more I am leaning towards the Drobo 5D now.

5 Bays (4TB in each)
Beyond RAID - mix and match different size/brand HDs
Hot swap
Thunderbolt/USB 3.0
SSD card boost - The unit then acts like a Hybrid drive

It should be much much more flexible than anything else but obviously to kit that up costs £660 plus HDs.

I am going to see what the next 3 months bring, I don't have a wedding until March now so have time to research more.
 
Drobo 5n or 5d would both be good, i like the mini too :D

It's lots of money though, as it's only a back up system and storage system i'm keeping my drobo and using a TB to FW connector. Through put is still more than fast enough to allow the images to be on drobo and let LR4 pull the images off dor editing.

You got a date for the imac? Mines still 3rd to 9th Jan :)
 
The drobo 5D is more than just a NAS though, it is a combination of RAID 0, 1, and 5 I think. It does not need matching hard drives, it is hot swapable. When you have 5 drives, 2 can fail and your data is still safe. It has on board UPS for uninterrupted power down should the power get cut off in a sudden. It can take and SSD drive to be a hybrid, so if you are working on a particular set of photos, it will move those to the SSD for quick access.

It is the best plug and play RAID/access/back up solution I can think of. Only downside is the price tag. Literally it unbox, plug it in, slot in hard drives. No screws required, nothing, just 1 software to install and it's technical support is also very good having tried it myself.

I don't know how much space I need, it seems last few years is about 1TB a year but it is not about how much space I need now, it's about expansion. I don't want to have 3HDs via USB all dangling off with 3 power plugs too, just so fiddlely. 1 wire, 1 volume, fast, safe, just expensive.

It also remove the headache of what if a drive fail, it removes the fear of using large hard drives.
 
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digitalfailure said:
Drobo 5n or 5d would both be good, i like the mini too :D

It's lots of money though, as it's only a back up system and storage system i'm keeping my drobo and using a TB to FW connector. Through put is still more than fast enough to allow the images to be on drobo and let LR4 pull the images off dor editing.

You got a date for the imac? Mines still 3rd to 9th Jan :)
Click to expand...

Mine is 31st Dec to 7th jan, it's been "processing" for a weeks now though, how long does it take to put together a computer?
 
Mines still at the processing stage, they took the money just after order but it showed up in my bank again a couple of days later :shrug:
 
Hi, look at a company called synology. I have a ds712+, I can shift a 2.5GB file in around 30 seconds to it I also run 2 ESX hosts with 10 VM's on each one.

It also has a number of other features you can add on such as DNLA services, web server email server etc.

However don't use wireless unless its MIMO compliant on the 5Ghz band for large files.
 
Raymond Lin said:
The drobo 5D is more than just a NAS though, it is a combination of RAID 0, 1, and 5 I think. It does not need matching hard drives, it is hot swapable. When you have 5 drives, 2 can fail and your data is still safe. It has on board UPS for uninterrupted power down should the power get cut off in a sudden. It can take and SSD drive to be a hybrid, so if you are working on a particular set of photos, it will move those to the SSD for quick access.

It is the best plug and play RAID/access/back up solution I can think of. Only downside is the price tag. Literally it unbox, plug it in, slot in hard drives. No screws required, nothing, just 1 software to install and it's technical support is also very good having tried it myself.

I don't know how much space I need, it seems last few years is about 1TB a year but it is not about how much space I need now, it's about expansion. I don't want to have 3HDs via USB all dangling off with 3 power plugs too, just so fiddlely. 1 wire, 1 volume, fast, safe, just expensive.

It also remove the headache of what if a drive fail, it removes the fear of using large hard drives.
Click to expand...

I didn't say NAS I said DAS :)

Although a lot of modern NAS will do what you want also. But obviously won't be as fast as a direct attached drive (although working over gigabit Ethernet is perfectly fine).
 
I already have a drobo connected over Ethernet though :p

I don't work from it, it is purely as backup storage for my files. This new drive/DAS is going to be connected direct to the iMac to work from.
 
Paul_Westhead said:
Hi, look at a company called synology. I have a ds712+, I can shift a 2.5GB file in around 30 seconds to it I also run 2 ESX hosts with 10 VM's on each one.

It also has a number of other features you can add on such as DNLA services, web server email server etc.

However don't use wireless unless its MIMO compliant on the 5Ghz band for large files.
Click to expand...

Question. Can I do the following?

1 - unbox
2 - plug in drives
3 - power up
4 - use

Or does it need setting up ?
 
neil_g said:
I didn't say NAS I said DAS :)

Although a lot of modern NAS will do what you want also. But obviously won't be as fast as a direct attached drive (although working over gigabit Ethernet is perfectly fine).
Click to expand...

I wouldn't say that was wholly correct. A decent NAS is going to compete with a SOHO / SMB DAS the maximum throughput in my experience is now down to the bus you are attaching these devices too but that is a completely different conversation.
 
Paul_Westhead said:
I wouldn't say that was wholly correct. A decent NAS is going to compete with a SOHO / SMB DAS the maximum throughput in my experience is now down to the bus you are attaching these devices too but that is a completely different conversation.
Click to expand...

It's a bit old "how long is a bit of string" conversation.. I'll easily get 90Mb/s from the Microserver over gigabit (again loads of variables, that's normally large files so sustained rate), 70Mb/s from the DS1010+. Usb2 normally 30Mb/s (but "should" be better at faster burst for smaller files), usb3 and esata "should" be much faster (I don't currently have either of these devices so honestly couldn't say).
 
Raymond Lin said:
Question. Can I do the following?

1 - unbox
2 - plug in drives
3 - power up
4 - use

Or does it need setting up ?
Click to expand...

Hi,

Short answer is no, however it's really easy in my opinion.

There are videos on their website showing most of the functionality if you want to look. But I had my wife set my synology unit up without instruction and she did it.

Have a flick around see what is available personally I wouldn't be using removable storage any more unless its for shifting files from a device that is only USB capable. I think you get far better utilisation out of a NAS with a decent network and SSD drives for local machine cache.

Hope this helps.
 
Paul_Westhead said:
Hi,

Short answer is no, however it's really easy in my opinion.

There are videos on their website showing most of the functionality if you want to look. But I had my wife set my synology unit up without instruction and she did it.

Have a flick around see what is available personally I wouldn't be using removable storage any more unless its for shifting files from a device that is only USB capable. I think you get far better utilisation out of a NAS with a decent network and SSD drives for local machine cache.

Hope this helps.
Click to expand...

I don't want another NAS lol I already got one, a drobo FS.

I would get SSD for local but it's not big enough and I can't afford a 3TB SSD....
 
This is the thing, if you want large volumes of data you're fairly limited on options for over 4tb. A decent NAS over gigabit would be a viable option.

Otherwise in the multi bay DAS arena the most options come in usb3. esata you start running into port multiplier issues (I.e you can't on an iMac as far as I know), FireWire options seem to be very limited and I'm discounting thunderbolt for being rediculously expensive and pointlessly over specd on bandwidth.
 
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