Likewise, not such great experience with their SoftRaid, plus it keeps asking for updates which I don’t want to risk at all for the fear of breaking other things (as it did in the past). Really wish OWC made also a hardware raid/plug n play version of their ThunderBlades which would also free up the live, continuous usage of CPUs (whatever percentage it maybe) for the software raid read/write duties. Id rather have all/maximum CPUs power devoted to flame for obvious reasons.
Yeah, another downside of the software raid setups, the very slow rebuild / recovery process. Not to hijack, but if anyone here is using a hardware raid framestore, would love to get some recommendation/guidance from them on an existing/related or a new thread if better suited.
I’ve never lost a frame on a Promise Pegasus. Here’s their NAB Guest Pass Code: NS9559. Not inexpensive but I’ve had single drives die in their enclosures several times in my career, and the rebuild has always been seamless. Just keep a spare drive handy of equal or greater capacity.
Only negative is that the early Pegasus drives got EOL’d and no longer worked on M series Macs. I needed to find a a later enclosure and move the physical media to the new enclosure. Otherwise, bulletproof. Great performance for what they are. I’ve even striped several enclosures in Apple disk utility for better performance and greater capacity.
Promise Pegasus is indeed solid. I have a 8 drive RAID 5 TB unit which has been running straight through since 2019 without any issues. Not quite NVME speeds, but very decent.
Hardware raid is overrated these days.
Think about how hardware raid cards work and youll come to the same conclusions.
The answer is lots of flash storage and there are very few deviations from the recipe:
More cores
More Ram
More PCIe
More network
And Robert is your mother’s brother
ZFS is the strongest and most compatible way to dump bits into buckets
YMMV
Thx, philm, much appreciated.
Should have mentioned, specifically looking for external framestore. Not a fan of internal cards for framestore for a few reasons.
Ideal setup would be plug n play, external, NVMEs Hardware raid.
If you’re raiding flash you have to ask yourself how compressing the data map in a raid controller is accelerating or throttling your throughput.
And what happens when that super hot raid controller fries itself?
These are just thought experiments.
Sure. But there’s some beauty in giving B&H a credit card, a box shows up, you plugin a TB cable and for the next 7 years you spend less than 30min on that box and it just works.
I totally get the appeal of being ‘low cost’ or ‘off the chart clever’ by being an IT mastermind. But my day only has so many hours, during which I need to do billable work and take care of life to make it all worth dealing with this.
In the last year I did a major work-life balance upgrade. Not endangering this with fancy storage solutions, when something easier does the job good enough.
So yes, MMDV.
No this is great information. I have little to no knowledge about how data is managed by the controller or such underpinnings, etc, so all this is educational for me.
I am only hoping that if a manufacturer goes the hardware controller route for trades with continuous, high throughput demands like ours, they keep all that in mind.
Topic for another thread/discussion, but the HW components’ heating/overheating is another reason why I like to keep all the add-on hardware like framestore out of the box as much as possible, so the main CPUs/GPUs overheating (=> throttling) is kept to as minimum as possible, or in an ideal world, are never allowed to overheat/throttle at all.
Everything is dependent on your particular environment.
AI is very good for this.
Tell it the flame hardware that you have and the ambition for storage and let AI do the research, the comparisons, the benefits or deficits, etc.
Your overall long-term best bet is to build your own but you need to put effort into it, and some people prefer to buy something that they can just plug in and go.
I would recommend https://www.qnap.com/en-uk/product/ts-h1277afx
I love that there are youtubers out there going this deep into our weird niche. Thanks for sharing this!
Different Alan
Same depth and intensity of information.
Happy weekend.
so I should put my Thunderblade X12s back to default. which I think is apple striped Raid 0?? happy to.
I have just changed them both to apple raid 0. all good so far. nice to have the full24TB on each!