Need help with deciding on a new external desktop drive

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Not A Speck Of Cereal said:
It gets a lot simpler when you realize that your viewpoint isn't the only correct one.

Chris
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Chris, perhaps you should read what I said a little more carefully…all along I said that there was zero wrong with doing this via a NAS since either way will provide the same capabilities…but that if one does use a NAS you're paying more money for those capabilties and not getting any actual benefit…because users like us don't have enough clients and usually not a robust enough network for the additional capabilities to actually make a difference…and that there was no point in spending more money for the same performance. There are situations where a NAS or SAN make sense…and then there are what is essentially home or small business users like us…and they don't make economic sense for those users but will work just fine…just as your Ferrari is happy to go 30mph to the grocery store.
 
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John Navitsky said:
truenas, which leverages zfs is a lot more sophisticated than most raid software packages. ymmv
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OK at the risk of even further complicating this discussion, and speaking from someone who is definitely not a computer engineer, what the heck is truenas and zfs?

More importantly is this something I can or should want to use?
 
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Viathelens said:
Hi, I have to buy a new external desk top drive system for my Mac. I want to use Thunderbolt connections. I'm out of space on my current two drives. I need at minimum 16-20T to cover my current images and leave some room for new images. I'm currently using 2 external drives on RAID systems, a total of 10T with images and maxed out. I looked at buying an SSD for images and then an HDD for the backup instead of a RAID but the SSD is more than I want to spend for the storage space I need. Any comments on the item below? Any recommendations along the lines of what I currently use? It looks like using a RAID system is more affordable than trying to buy an SSD/HDD setup. I'm not a "techie," but do know enough to figure things out and make it all work fine once I get it. I do backup off site, which will be a PITA because now I'll have to back up the new drives! My drives now are G drives and one My Book Thunderbolt. I've only used the small travel external drives from LaCie but have been happy with them. Any suggestions? I'm at a standstill and heading to Yellowstone next week so won't be able to download that set of images until the new drive system is in place, after I return two weeks later. This drive is currently BO'd but I'd wait for it if people think it is ok.

View attachment 89820
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My advice is avoid buying this Product. I boughttwo of them (40 Tb each) One from Amazon and the other from a photographic Store well known here in Canada ( Vistek). The first drive stopped working after a month. It had 34 tb data. The second one whichi used as a back up for the first stopped working after 3 days from receiving it and transferring my files to it.
The big problem, is Seagate Service. You can only chat with them. The agents are nice, but they can’t resolve the issue. I sent both drive for data recovery ( Service included ). I got an email that they received my first drive and nothing about the second one. I tried to contact them to see what happened with my drive, but the phone seems alwYs disconnected. I sent them email, they never answered me. I tried to chat with no result. Data recovery was supposed to take at most 30 days. Two months later, nothing the Recovery Lab. my client files are on both drives. My Lightroom catalogue is on both drive. I wrote to the CEO asking for his help. He never replied. One day I found a box on my door, it was a replacement drive. Someone left on my door under the rain. The next week, another replacement drive arrived in sthe same way and the box was opened. I spend more than 40 hours of chat, with more than 8 opened cases. Three months later I received an email from the Recovery Lab that my data was fully and successfully recovered. I was happy until I got the recovery drives. Instead of 34 tb of data, they recovered 12 tb For the first drive. For the second it showed 35 tb ( it had 34 Tb of data in use). When I opened it, it was files that they were copied four times. So many data missing. My Lightroom catalogue was lost from both drives.
Add to that the replacement drives which supposed to have five year gurantee, showed when I registered them, thst the guarantee is three months. It took me 4 times chat, each time one hours and a half for them moto correct the guarantee.

i have never experience such horrible service. As I told you AVOID this compagny. I am like you now trying to find a safe way to back up my data. I am also trying again to build my Lightroom and Capture One catalogue.

Lina
 
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wotan1 said:
OK at the risk of even further complicating this discussion, and speaking from someone who is definitely not a computer engineer, what the heck is truenas and zfs?

More importantly is this something I can or should want to use?
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basically zfs is a next gen filesystem (despite being introduced in 2001) that basically combines the filesystem and the volume/raid type functions and by combining them, it can be smarter about a lot of things.

and it has a lot of features.

but basically it's the best raid/filesystem available, by a long margin.

but... do you care?

that's hard to say. for a lot of people, probably not.

while it can be run locally on a lot of filesystems, right now it fits pretty well with nas because you can use something like truenas which packages it up using an appliance type interface making it easier to use, and less likely to run afoul of the ongoing changes of your operating system.

ZFS - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

overview:

Wendell's somewhat reflective overview:
 
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Anjin San said:
We're talking external drives here…so not being able to fit any more internal storage is not an issue.
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considering the only way i have to attach storage is via usb which has a whole host of issues, i consider attaching ~40TB of storage externally a no-go in my case. if i had any way to get thunderbolt without replacing my system, i might have considered it, but usb... notsomuch.
 
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Activert said:
My advice is avoid buying this Product. I boughttwo of them (40 Tb each) One from Amazon and the other from a photographic Store well known here in Canada ( Vistek). The first drive stopped working after a month. It had 34 tb data. The second one whichi used as a back up for the first stopped working after 3 days from receiving it and transferring my files to it.
The big problem, is Seagate Service. You can only chat with them. The agents are nice, but they can’t resolve the issue. I sent both drive for data recovery ( Service included ). I got an email that they received my first drive and nothing about the second one. I tried to contact them to see what happened with my drive, but the phone seems alwYs disconnected. I sent them email, they never answered me. I tried to chat with no result. Data recovery was supposed to take at most 30 days. Two months later, nothing the Recovery Lab. my client files are on both drives. My Lightroom catalogue is on both drive. I wrote to the CEO asking for his help. He never replied. One day I found a box on my door, it was a replacement drive. Someone left on my door under the rain. The next week, another replacement drive arrived in sthe same way and the box was opened. I spend more than 40 hours of chat, with more than 8 opened cases. Three months later I received an email from the Recovery Lab that my data was fully and successfully recovered. I was happy until I got the recovery drives. Instead of 34 tb of data, they recovered 12 tb For the first drive. For the second it showed 35 tb ( it had 34 Tb of data in use). When I opened it, it was files that they were copied four times. So many data missing. My Lightroom catalogue was lost from both drives.
Add to that the replacement drives which supposed to have five year gurantee, showed when I registered them, thst the guarantee is three months. It took me 4 times chat, each time one hours and a half for them moto correct the guarantee.

i have never experience such horrible service. As I told you AVOID this compagny. I am like you now trying to find a safe way to back up my data. I am also trying again to build my Lightroom and Capture One catalogue.

Lina
Click to expand...
Excellent information, thank you.
 
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wotan1 said:
OK at the risk of even further complicating this discussion, and speaking from someone who is definitely not a computer engineer, what the heck is truenas and zfs?

More importantly is this something I can or should want to use?
Click to expand...
Very simplified explanation follows. Truenas is an operating system…probably based on either an Android or Linux kernel…that is used to operate some network attached storage (or NAS) devices. A NAS is an appliance tha5 shares some drive space to your local network and is functionally the same as connecting a drive to a macos or windows or other OS computer and then sharing that drive. ZFS is a file system that has some advantages in low level management of hard drive space. At this point…few regular operating systems support and while it has advantages it has not achieved wide use…and for most people it is so low level in how it works that it’s not something you want to worry about. This last is a summary of ZFS and not intended to be a full explanation…because even as a computer geek I pay little attention to the details because it isn’t mainstream and may never be.

Truenas is only important to you if you own certain brands of NAS hardware…and ZFS is such low level stuff that for the most part us mere mortals…of which I’m one…don’t really ca4e about it.
 
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John Navitsky said:
considering the only way i have to attach storage is via usb which has a whole host of issues, i consider attaching ~40TB of storage externally a no-go in my case. if i had any way to get thunderbolt without replacing my system, i might have considered it, but usb... notsomuch.
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I don’t know what your system entails…but if you need 40TB of storage and your computer can’t support a fast connection via TB…then maybe you should consider an upgrade to the computer. Not trying to be unhelpful…but it would seem that a photographer needing 40TB of space would have a relatively current computer that could support TB. Granted..usb has some issues..and I wouldn’t hook up a large array via usb either…but from a strictly cost perspective the price of a more capable computer isn’t much when you’re talking about buying 40TB of RAID of some sort drive space. Sometimes needs outgrow the system…says the guy that still has a 10c year old Mac unningnas a backup server in the entertainment center…and the only reason it hasn’t been replace pd yet is the “if it ain’t broke” idea. I’m pretty sure the next version of macOS will sunset security updates for hardware that old…so I see a near term replacement though.
t old
 
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So if I wanted to use Direct Attached Storage over my network and make it accessible from wherever I am, how would I do? I tried searching for info and all I get is NAS info. My computers are all Macs.
 
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RecalcitrantRon said:
So if I wanted to use Direct Attached Storage over my network and make it accessible from wherever I am, how would I do? I tried searching for info and all I get is NAS info. My computers are all Macs.
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You could connect it to your router directly. Another option is the file sharing option under system settings. Connect the drive to your Mac and then select the file sharing panel under system settings.
 
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Ralph said:
You could connect it to your router directly. Another option is the file sharing option under system settings. Connect the drive to your Mac and then select the file sharing panel under system settings.
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I tried the connect to the router method before and it was no good. Couldn’t get a consistent stable connection. I’ll try the file sharing. Thanks.
 
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I love my 5 bay raid 6 Synology NAS. It's so easy to access wirelessly from anywhere in the house with any of my devices. It has 12tb of storage with its 5 @ 4tb drives. Speeds are mostly constrained by my old laptop.
The drives were given to me by my brother who upgraded to larger disks. He had one fail and did a plug and play replacement, but went to larger a disk size.
I feel good about finally having a safer storage solution than multiple external drives. I'm going to use my old Seagate 8tb drive to do another backup of the NAS.
I'm still learning how to manage the NAS but love it so far. It's pretty simple for my modest needs.
 
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RecalcitrantRon said:
So if I wanted to use Direct Attached Storage over my network and make it accessible from wherever I am, how would I do? I tried searching for info and all I get is NAS info. My computers are all Macs.
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The easiest way is to use one of the cloud sync programs. Dropbox requires the folder be on your boot drive but it is possible…sometimes and IIRC it keeps getting broken. Sync lets you put it anywhere so just put the Sync folder in its prefs on the external…Box and others also work. Once you’ve designated the folder to be synced it will get reflected to the cloud and you can get it via another device and the pp or via web browser.

There are other ways but this is the easiest…

Dependiing on how much data you need available and available and the size of the internal drive you might not need another drive to do this.
 
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Someone can correct me if i am wrong but I am assuming Synology devices are set up at NAS only and they are not the best choice if you are going DAS.

That begs the question, what IS the best quality equipmentN for a DAS RAID?
 
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tbh, i wouldn’t bother with a DAS RAID. i would just get DAS (like the OWC stuff).

if you need raid you can do software raid.

optimally USB4, second choice thunderbolt. i’d only do 10Gb usb if i was desperate

on the windows side i’d look at using storage spaces
 
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Stay as far away from Windows Storage Spaces as you can. I say this as a user who tried hard to make it work for many years, and also as an insider. It's flawed in some ways and it's known that those flaws will probably never be fixed.

I would still recommend RAID even in DAS for performance and advanced file system properties such as bit rot protection and more robust indexing, plus other conveniences such as hot swapping defective drives without stopping the service and easily increasing the volume size by simply adding a drive to the pool.

Chris
 
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it’s a bit philosophical and probably not for people not super into computers, but i think this is a good discussion about problems with current hw raid

one thing you might glean from this is hw raid isn’t the panacea people may assume

the other thing you might take-away is there is no free lunch

 
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John Navitsky said:
to be fair i haven’t been using it, mostly eyeballing it’s feature list
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It's a difficult thing to just try and see, because when you finally decide to abandon it, you need to completely rebuild your storage, which means having enough of something else (multiple backups) to hold your stuff for the several days it takes to rebuild your volume.

You also need "Windows Pro for Workstations" to get their RFS file system (not just regular Windows Pro, as it was originally available for).
 
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afaik, you don’t specifically need ReFS to use Storage Spaces, but some features may not be available or work differently depending if you have the ReFS enablement.

For example it sounds like if you are using performance tiering, if you have ReFS, migration between tiers is real-time, but if you only have NTFS, migration is done via some daily batch processing. if i recall correctly, pro for workstations gets you ReFS but Storage Spaces is available at a lower level, but i don't know what the cutoff is. i get the impression this has been a bit of a moving target, and there's weird things like i don't think there's a gui for it in windows 10, but it's there.

your point about the complications of having large data sets is good and i was actually going to make a comment explicitly on that topic generically because this applies equally if you're using storage spaces, or raid....

folks should be aware that whenever you start bundling your storage into bigger chunks, data management gets more complicated, takes longer and you have more restrictions.

for example, if i have four 10tb hard drives, if i want to add some space, i can just add a another drive and start using it. however, if instead of those four 10tb hard rives i have 40tb of raid space, for one, now i have a LOT more data which will take a lot more time to move that data off that space if i need to, AND, if i want to re-do that raid to change it's configuration, i have to get ALL that data off, so it means i have to have 40tb of scratch space laying around in order to re-do that raid (your exact point about storage spaces, but it applys to any big bundling of storage including raid).

in addition, most raids can't just be (easily or simply) modified in place*. so i can't just add one drive to the raid, nor can i just pull a drive and shrink things.

basically raid (or any type of lumping of the storage into one big pile) makes everything harder and take longer and more complicated.

this, combined with some of the limitations of raid (see the video i linked), i usually don't bother with raid except for tertiary backup storage and there, i use something (zfs/truenas) that lets me manage that space better, as well as provides higher protections, and even then, i think if it was practical for my situation, i might not even do it there.

in any case, ymmv


* Unraid perhaps being a bit of an exception although
 
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