Looking to get a sense of what people are using for flame and other storage on here.
I’ve got a couple of OWC Thunderbay 4 enclosures attached to my mac, software raided to RAID5. Each one has four drives. One enclosure has 7200rpm disks and that’s my “Stone”, and can play back 10bit 3k (maybe 4k) but will stutter with 16 bit stuff. The other enclosure has 5400rpm drives and I use it like a server, for archives and whatnot.
It’s a pretty good low-cost (around $1800-2000) setup, but I want to know what else is out there.
Also speed wise it can do about 8k at 16 float. The catch is zfs raid z borrows from ram to enable that, so I have 7 1TB SSDs and give the filesystem access to 48 of my 128gb to allow for that
Pegasus j4i, the black brick thingy for internal Mac Pro is 24TB usable RAID5, x4 8TB HDD. 738MB/s Write, 560MB/s Read. Okay for HD, falls apart above 2160p 10bit.
I’m using a Highpoint SSD7101 NVME RAID card with x4 Sabrent 2TB NVME sticks, RAID0, 6,000MB/s Write/Read. Plays back anything, even when its set to encryption.
I also have x2 Thunderbay 6, filled with x6 Seagate IronWolf 8TB, RAID5, 370MB/s Write, 530MB/s Read, which is okay up to 1080p60, then falls apart.
I really love the Macsales/OWC stuff…I also have used and love the Thunderblade, which is the external Thunderbolt 3 x4 NVME, which gives screaming hot performance around the $265 per TB mark
Overall, anything Pegasus is great, but, expect it to come with spinning disks and approach the $90/TB mark. The Thunderbays come with enclosures only, which means you can so SSD if you want.
My vote? NVME RAID0 is great, cheap enough (sub $2,000 for 8TB) for framestore/caching, and archiving every night to Thunderbays. I also have my eyes on the Thunderbay Flex, an 8 enclosure HDD/SSD/PCIe flexible drive that is future proof and would look great on my desk.
I have a linux flame, so i use a dell superspeed PCIE card with two 1Tb NVME’s super duper fast.
Then i have a slow but dependable Synology for my server. its raid 1 so mirrored backup of 8TB. i place archives, jobs, whatever on there. When i want to clear things up i backup to HD’s using a dock, so i can just buy internal HD’s which are so low cost. I really wouldnt need my archives to last more than 3 years currently so i dont need a LTO just yet. I also have a older RAID SAS drives that i have internally that i bought years ago but still can get 600MB/s and i am using that on my windows partition for AE and the like. I may as well use them if they are still going strong!
depends on the needs honestly, I have an Infotrend 10gb array thats about 80 tb or so, I tried the thunderbolt storage and honestly its nice to be able to share more easily with a network drive, I often use two computers so something that links them together is nice, I use my thunderbolt now as a redundant backup.
I have an iMac Pro with 2 x Promise Pegasus R8 24TB each. I get about 700mb/s and that’s fast enough for my Flame and Resolve work. My Flame framestore lives on the system drive. (SSD 2tb) All of my drives get backed up to other hard drives each night.
totally. they are a little slower than the Samsungs and a little less revered and some storage snobs. Back up your stuff every night to one place locally and one place offsite and you should be fine.
The OWC I believe is only 8 lanes of PCIe whilst the Sonnet and Highpoints are 16 lanes so it’s not as fast as others straight off the bat. Does it matter? Probably not. Should you know about it? Probably.
Comparing the OWC RAID card vs RAID Controller, speed seems to be slower than the high point (6000MB/s v 14000MB/s)
I was looking for feedback from anyone that might be using one vs the other. If they notice any practical difference… does it feel slower at increasing res sizes, 2k, 4k, 8k etc.
Seem like the high point might be quicker for a similar price point…
If you stripe two of the OWC Accelsior 4M2‘s together as single raid 0 drive you can get 10,000.
Is the 14,000 posiible in a pci 3.0 motherboard?
I currently have one in my month old Mac Pro and it feels very nice and snappy and smooth playing down.
I’ve got an iMac pro and not ready to update to a Mac pro. just yet. If I’ve got a budget of about 1.5K what would you recommend on buying to use as my flamestore.
I’m running into an issue with my Thunder Bay drive where it randomly unmounts. I’ve been in touch with their tech support, which is responsive, but also shoves the issue off to being one that is Apple and/or Intel’s problem and not theirs.
So, what are some good external raids that can connect to a mac pro (trashcan) and don’t have thunderbolt connectivity issues?
