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.
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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.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.
How are the disks formatted. If they’re formatted for a PC you will have to reformat them.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.
Is the qnap 951 fast enough for primary hard drive for lightroom and photoshop? I want to house the catalog and photos on it.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.
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.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.
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.Is the qnap 951 fast enough for primary hard drive for lightroom and photoshop? I want to house the catalog and photos on it.
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.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.
Can you please provide a link to us wanting to explore the HYPER gear you reference?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.
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.Can you please provide a link to us wanting to explore the HYPER gear you reference?
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.I have the set up Hudson Henry recommended - check his videos with the 10GB.
Out of curiosity, what brand of SSDs failed?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.
I think Hudson's setup works great because he has other people he needs to share data with.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.
Easily done with either RAID or NAS though.I think Hudson's setup works great because he has other people he needs to share data with.
I do not understand. His NAS is setup for RAID.Easily done with either RAID or NAS though.
Thank you!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.
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.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?