Looking for recommendations for a good quality RAID 5 system for direct connection to a desktop.
I have heard negative reports about OWC and want others' experience.
I have heard negative reports about OWC and want others' experience.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR A RAID 5 ARRAY FOR DESKTOP
- Thread starter wotan1
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I use a DiskStation DS423+. You can connect to your Ethernet port. I have mine on my network, but will work connected to PC.
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I’ve been buying from OWC for 20something years and have not had any issue with them. One SSD failure after a month or so but it was promptly replaced. I have a ThunderBay Mini attached to my Mac Studio for quietness and older year originals for which it’s fast enough. LR catalog and current year images are on one of their TB SSDs with a second one that gets mirrored daily.
Thanks that is reassuring. I am trying to get my 4 bay OWC moved from PC to Apple and the Apple computer is not allowing me to set it up.
Calson
Well-known member
The two companies that have provided both well designed hardware and very good customer support (including firmware updates) are QNAP and Synology. In past research the QNAP were better for arrays with 4 or more drives and Synology was better for dual drive NAS.
I know that the trend is to use SSD for NAS but the performance gains are marginal if one is not using it on a network in a team environment with video editing. SSDs have a shorter life span with lots of writes and so I use hard drives. There is no performance gain with a fast 7200 rpm hard drive in a NAS array running RAID5 or 6 and these drives cost more and run a great deal hotter than the slower "5400" rpm NAS specific drives like the Seagate IronWolf NAS drives.
The QNAP 951 that I use has a 10GB as well as a 1GB port and I connect the 1GB to my wireless router and the 10GB is connected directly to a 10GB Ethernet card in my tower computer. Avoid the NAS boxes that implement RAID in software as the performance will be much worse.
I have used NAS for two other companies but they were a pain to maintain. I upgraded to a QNAP NAS and a few years ago added the 951x and now use the first NAS as a backup. QNAP provides software to sync two NAS boxes and to automate PC backups to the NAS. The support for media streaming is also excellent and included at no cost.
I know that the trend is to use SSD for NAS but the performance gains are marginal if one is not using it on a network in a team environment with video editing. SSDs have a shorter life span with lots of writes and so I use hard drives. There is no performance gain with a fast 7200 rpm hard drive in a NAS array running RAID5 or 6 and these drives cost more and run a great deal hotter than the slower "5400" rpm NAS specific drives like the Seagate IronWolf NAS drives.
The QNAP 951 that I use has a 10GB as well as a 1GB port and I connect the 1GB to my wireless router and the 10GB is connected directly to a 10GB Ethernet card in my tower computer. Avoid the NAS boxes that implement RAID in software as the performance will be much worse.
I have used NAS for two other companies but they were a pain to maintain. I upgraded to a QNAP NAS and a few years ago added the 951x and now use the first NAS as a backup. QNAP provides software to sync two NAS boxes and to automate PC backups to the NAS. The support for media streaming is also excellent and included at no cost.
How are the disks formatted. If they’re formatted for a PC you will have to reformat them.
Call OWC. @Ralph makes a good point, you may need to reformat the drives. @Anjin San I am one that used to buy OWC and had a terrible experience with my OWC Thunderbolt Pro dock, recommended by Hudson Henry, enough so that I will not buy from them again. I even sent it in under an RMA and they said it was fine, and it's not. The card reader heats my CFe cards like toast, and sometime terminates the ethernet connection when I put the CFe in. I get false disk disconnected errors. It's also not Pro in that it lacks sufficient Thunderbolt ports. My prior purchases were ok other than the NVMe enclosures which also run hot and throttle the speeds compared to the Hyper one I have. Hopefully @wotan1 you have a better experience than I had.
We ran into a brick wall trying to move this in to apple.
I have a request in to OWC to try to get this figured out.
I have a request in to OWC to try to get this figured out.
Is the qnap 951 fast enough for primary hard drive for lightroom and photoshop? I want to house the catalog and photos on it.
You need to get OWC’s SoftRAID app and install it On macOS. Then the array itself is probably NTFS which IIRC isn’t recognized so a reformat will be necessary…along with whatever is needed to backup the contents on the Windows side and restore on the Mac side later on unless you don’t care about losing the old contents.
I have the set up Hudson Henry recommended - check his videos with the 10GB. I still do no host the catalog on it. With the 10GB you can do your editing. I don't know about a regular 1GB one.
Why don't I host and edit on the NAS.
I needed the OWC dock for the 10GB ethernet. See above. Getting a DIY NMVE drive was simple and faster and allowed me to store my catalog and my WIP easy. At first I had the OWC, then HYPER came out with one that runs 2.5X faster with same NVMe. I use that now. I use Carbon Copy Cloner for Mac - a must have for Mac users - to automate file backups. So I backup the catalog to the NAS regularly. The NAS also backs up to another drive. I backup the images to another drive that goes to our relatives house. I have to still set up cloud storage with the NAS.
I have yet to find a 10GB ethernet adapter that people are happy with. So unless you have a MAC Studio with one you have that to consider. The OWC ethernet works great unless I plug in a CFe card into its slot. About 10-20% of the time it cuts off the internet.
I think it's too easy to use a much faster NVMe drive. If you need more ports HYPER makes a GAN hub - that means it doesn't have a giant power brick like the OWC ones.
Do that with a 1GB connection to the NAS and you should be fine.
PhotoLover
Well-known member
I'm curious -- and this is a question, not a suggestion it's a bad idea -- why you want a RAID system. I'm perfectly happy hooking up a fast SSD to the computer and backing up to an HDD. That fast SSD will be much faster than an HDD RAID system.
What characteristics of a RAID system are helpful to your situation?
Calson
Well-known member
NAS to PC data I/O is limited by the CPU in the NAS and the bandwidth of the ports on the NAS and the PC (and the switch if one is used). The computer industry is migrating very slowly to 10GB Ethernet and some of the current workstations with i9 processors are still shipping with a 1GB Ethernet port. A small few have 2.5GB Ethernet ports. The QNAP 951x is one of a few NAS that provides a 10GB Ethernet port and why I bought it.
The CPU is important for RAID implemented in the hardware and the slowest NAS units are the ones that use a Linux variant to implement RAID in software. If deciding between different 4-bay NAS it is a good idea to compare the processor and amount of RAM that is used or can be added later.
Good idea to check the reviews by customers at places like BH Photo and Egghead and Amazon to learn about customer support or a lack thereof. There are some good independent forums which can be useful but better if it is not needed. I get firmware updates 3 times a year for my two QNAP NAS and have not had a problem since buying the first one in 2015 with the updates which continue to be produced to address new security threats or add new functionality. An exception appears to be with the 2-drive bay economy NAS from QNAP where customers have reported problems and so probably best to avoid.
The CPU is important for RAID implemented in the hardware and the slowest NAS units are the ones that use a Linux variant to implement RAID in software. If deciding between different 4-bay NAS it is a good idea to compare the processor and amount of RAM that is used or can be added later.
Good idea to check the reviews by customers at places like BH Photo and Egghead and Amazon to learn about customer support or a lack thereof. There are some good independent forums which can be useful but better if it is not needed. I get firmware updates 3 times a year for my two QNAP NAS and have not had a problem since buying the first one in 2015 with the updates which continue to be produced to address new security threats or add new functionality. An exception appears to be with the 2-drive bay economy NAS from QNAP where customers have reported problems and so probably best to avoid.
I finally got it to work. Reformatted everything and erased all prior error messages and it finally settled down and allowed the RAID to be mounted.
I am up and running.
I am up and running.
Can you please provide a link to us wanting to explore the HYPER gear you reference?
Hyper NVMe enclosure - Showing out of stock at Hyper Store; may find it elsewhere. I have a Crucial 4TB in mine. I paid $179 at the time. I get 2900 write speeds and 3100 read speeds on an M1 Mac in one of the Mac ports. It doesn't get that speed going through the Thunderbolt Port on the OwC. Hyper is owned by Targus now.
So far no issues with this. I have two OWC Thunderbolt enclosures with Samsung 970's in them that only get about 1100-1300 write speeds. I use those for backup now. I use CCC to automate backups to the NAS and Seagate expansion disk as well.
Hudson is a great photographer, does great YouTube videos and is an all around good guy…but it’s clear that being the computer geek really isn’t his primary niche. He’s not wrong with his NAS…but his video acts like it’s the only solution and really…it isn’t. I’m not knocking the NAS as storage…but what one boils down to is…it’s a computer with a shared drive that makes the shared drive available on your LAN and potentially across the internet. But hanging a RAID off of your regular old LR computer at home provides out of the box most of the advantages of the NAS…the same or better speed if it’s connected via Thunderbolt…and can provide all of the advantages of the NAS with slight effort. The advantage of the RAID over the NAS is you don’t end up with another computer to manage and keep updated. Ypu still have to back up either the NAS or the RAID…so no plus or minus either way there. The RAID is is going to cost you a lot less than a NAS built with 10GB as well. But in reality…either is just fine.
Calson
Well-known member
For images not on the NAS I still use mirrored drives in the tower computer. When one SSD fails I still have my data safely stored on the other drive. I had two NVME M.2 SSD fail within 18 months and was glad I could replace the failed drive and not lose any of my work.
After 40 years working with computers I know that all components with fail at some point and the best strategy is to mirror active data files and archive data on a NAS with a RAID array. I have used a dual drive mirror or RAID1 on all my Windows and Mac OS computers for the past 20 years and a key reason I limit my use of laptops for image processing at home.
After 40 years working with computers I know that all components with fail at some point and the best strategy is to mirror active data files and archive data on a NAS with a RAID array. I have used a dual drive mirror or RAID1 on all my Windows and Mac OS computers for the past 20 years and a key reason I limit my use of laptops for image processing at home.
Out of curiosity, what brand of SSDs failed?
I think Hudson's setup works great because he has other people he needs to share data with.
Easily done with either RAID or NAS though.
I do not understand. His NAS is setup for RAID.
I now have my OWC RAID 5 array in operation. I was able to restore the contents of the drive as they were on the PC. I then was able to run the same catalog I was using on the PC. It seems to be working fine, it can't find some of the images but I am sure I can re-point to the images and get it back to where it was. We still have a few tweaks to get the setup working correctly but I should be finished with that end shortly.
I have decided to try an experiment.
The Mac Studio has a 1 tb internal drive which is too small to deal with Lightroom given where i am now and where i am headed so I want a drive that can be used to run Lightroom photo editing.
My experiment is that I ordered a SanDisk professional G-drive pro studio ssd with a high end enterprise grade SSD. I want to see if this offers better performance on Lightroom. If it does I will keep it and the RAID will handle the backup. If not I can return it.
I have decided to try an experiment.
The Mac Studio has a 1 tb internal drive which is too small to deal with Lightroom given where i am now and where i am headed so I want a drive that can be used to run Lightroom photo editing.
My experiment is that I ordered a SanDisk professional G-drive pro studio ssd with a high end enterprise grade SSD. I want to see if this offers better performance on Lightroom. If it does I will keep it and the RAID will handle the backup. If not I can return it.
Thank you!
I am looking for a combination of adequate speed and some protection against drive failure. The RAID 5 in the case of a four drive array provides three striped drives plus one redundant drive.