rodolini

Hi All!

Have been lurking for years but this is my first post so be gentle :-) (and thank you to everyone for the great information over the years!)

I have a new MacBook Pro (not M1). I had been storing all of my images onto an external 8T drive and backing up to a second 8T drive using Time Machine. I also change all drives every year and store the older ones off site. That worked fine but now that I am getting into video, I have added a second 8T drive for small projects and video. Of course 1 8T drive can't back up 2 8T drives and I haven't been able to figure out if Time Machine will backup to 2 separate drives.

I have seen in the past that people are recommending RAID arrays for both speed and redundancy. I searched on UHH and google but would like some experienced users to help to steer me.

I am looking for a reputable company to help me configure an array. I did a quick look on B&H but am thinking that I should maybe be looking at a computer company instead.

I would appreciate any help/advice.

Thanks!

Suzanne

jscorbin Loc: Woodinville, WA

Hi Suzanne,
I have had a good experience and good service from OWC, with their Thunderbay 4 enclosure and enterprise drives. The drive comes with the SoftRAID XT software, which has outstanding help and guidance. I installed a RAID 5 system, which is the default with SoftRAID, and seems to offer the best combination of speed, redundancy, and safety. The four 6TB drives combine into one 18 TB virtual device. If any one drive should fail, it is hot-swappable with no loss of data. I've had the system for a year, and the SoftRAID developers are quick to update with changes in MacOS, for example from MacOS 10 to 11. They also offer good support by phone or email.

OWC now offers the Thunderbay 4 Mini, a compact system with a choice of 2.5" hard drives or SSD drives, from a 2 to a 16 TB system.
https://www.owcdigital.com/products/thunderbay-4-mini-thunderbolt-3

I actually ordered my system from B & H.

rodolini

Thanks! That is exactly the kind of info I was looking for!

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

The issue with an external HW RAID is the controller card. One more point of failure and the particular card determines how the data is laid down on the disk, which implies that the data on the disks may only be able to be read by an array with the same type of controller. If it were me, I would buy a fan cooled JBOD (just a bunch of drives) drive enclosure, populate it with the drives of your choice, and create the RAID set using the functionality built into your operating system. Cheaper and more robust.

The speed and level of redundancy will be determined by what RAID level you choose, whichever way you go.

rodolini

Thanks TriX!

I hadn't heard of JBOD although that sounds similar to what I am doing now but probably more efficient. I will definitely look into it. Are there any particular brands of enclosures and drives that you would recommend?

Suzanne

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

RAID is not specifically for backup. When properly implemented, it does provide redundancy and downtime reduction, but not backup in the traditional sense. If you need to have full time 24/7/365 access to your data with no downtime, RAID is great. As far was what level of RAID, I would not suggest anything less than 0+1 or 1+0. No one who cares about their data would implement RAID 5. It is slow, only has one drive for parity, and changes to the striped drives require an update to the parity drive, which diminishes its fault tolerance and overall performance. In a RAID 5, if one drive faults, the remaining two drives are completely vulnerable until the failed drive is replaced. In the other schemes there is double redundancy, therefore better fault tolerance. I would avoid software RAID for performance and reliability reasons.

However, neither of these provide a backup solution per se. Good backups create historical data sets, so if something goes wrong or gets corrupted you can go back several generations to get to the last version of a file before the fault. For efficient disk utilization, backups should be incremental, ie, only files that have been changed/added are actually copied. You don't need to make a complete copy of an entire drive to consider it backed up, so technically, you could use a smaller drive to back up a bigger drive, as long as the data being recorded is not bigger than the smaller drive. The drive capacity is not a factor here. There is a lot to know about backup, and unfortunately you are not likely to come by people who actually know what they are doing and will likely give you well-meaning but potentially dangerous advice. At the end of the day, your backup should have 3 copies, 2 of them local on separate devices, and one in a remote location.

A mirror image of your system drive should also be made periodically, in the event of theft, fire, flood, catastrophic failure, etc. so that you can rebuild the system drive to a similar computer. The issue of data security can be a rabbit hole, but one that anyone who uses a computer needs to venture into on a regular basis.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

all the JBODs I’m familiar with are enterprise/commercial grade and not cost effective for personal use unless you pick up a used one. Perhaps someone else has bought a consumer grade (with a fan) recently and can recommend. Pick one with an interface that matches what’s available on your Mac, and buy more slots than you need right now, both for a spare and future expansion. I do recommend you buy enterprise class drives such as the HGST/WD UltraStar - well worth the extra $ for the reliability.

Once you choose your HW and the number of drives we can discuss the optimum RAID level for speed and resilience. You may find this post on Apple useful: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252494089

rodolini

Thanks! This is a rabbit hole for sure. I had no idea that there would be so many options/complications. I have been using google and youtube to try to get a better idea of the possibilities. Glad to get your comments about RAID 5 because that is what I was considering. What do you think about RAID 6 and RAID 10?

I like the idea of having full time access but need the redundancy also - and of course speed is always a concern.

What I had been using worked pretty well until I added the second external drive and started running out of room.

I do like the idea of having one case to contain the drives to clean up my desk and remove some of the extra cords that I have floating around. It looks like that could be solved with a RAID case or JBOD.

I am fairly software savvy but know very little about hardware. I was considering contacting B&H but have received some imperfect recommendations from them lately. I will still probably call them on Sunday.

I will also look for a computer website just to see if the advice and pricing are consistent. I would appreciate any website/company recommendations. Thanks.

rodolini

Thanks for the link! I will look into setting up Time Machine again. I tried at one point but had no success. This link should help.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

As I understand the OP’s initial post, she is seeking a larger backup space than a single drive can provide AND a single namespace because of her concerns about TimeFinder backing up to multiple drives, and a RAID array CAN be used for that purpose. A RAID array can provide more speed, redundancy or capacity than a single drive, and her expressed goal is the latter. A RAID array can be used for working storage or for on-site backup.

I agree that RAID 5 is not the optimum RAID level for large files such as imagery. It was originally designed to provide concurrent access for small files for multiple users. RAID 5 machines use rotating parity across all drives, and will continue to deliver data with a single failed drive, but typically at ~50% performance hit when in a degraded state. Until the failed drive is replaced with a spare and rebuilt (which can take days with large drives), you are vulnerable to losing data if a second failure occurs. Many modern RAID 5 machines can also be configured as a so called “RAID 6” which, at the expense of adding another drive, can write a second parity block allowing a double drive failure without loss of data.

The appropriate RAID level for high performance imagery storage is a RAID 3 machine (byte striped with dedicated parity drive), but arrays that support this level are hard to find. A RAID 4 machine such as a NetAPP (block striped with dedicated parity) are an acceptable compromise between large and small file performance. Another option, as you mentioned is a RAID 1+0 (or 0+1) array - long the favorite of DBAs. You are essentially striping for speed and mirroring for redundancy. These configurations MAY survive a double drive failure depending on where the failures occur. Calculations suggest that a 1+0 is more resilient than a 0+1 configuration. Any of the above will provide the additional capacity the OP desires, but RAID 5 would be my last choice for images.

Regarding HW vs SW RAID group striping, I’ve already provided my preference for SW and the reason. There’s no reason that a consumer grade HW RAID is necessarily faster than drives striped by the OS and the drive HBA (consider as an extreme example a pair of NVME m.2 SSDs striped by the OS - no external HW RAID will touch that for speed). Those proprietary controller boards are built to a cost and never provide the level of support and reliability that is available from the OS manufacturer unless you purchase an enterprise class machine. Add to that the fact that the striping algorithm is not standard across platforms, so unless they are a simple mirror, with the same block size, you’ll likely need the same brand of controller board to read them - a potential issue with small companies that regularly go belly-up.

I absolutely concur that versioning such as VSS (volume shadow copy service) that is supported by Windows or Snapshots of the file system is a necessity so that you can return to an earlier version of the file (or the entire file system) in the event of corruption, viruses, unintentional encryption (ransomware) or accidental deletions. I’m not familiar enough with the Mac platform to recommend a versioning mechanism for that platform/file system. I also strongly agree that in addition to to a backup copy of your data, you should have an off-site disaster recovery copy of your data. I prefer the cloud from a major provider, but don’t want to open than bag of worms. Finally, I absolutely prefer a mirrored copy (where you can simply point your client to the mirrored copy) rather than a compressed backup/restore solution. Even professional backup SW such as NetBackup restores do fail - seen way too many.

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

Call Other World Computing aka "MacSales.com" They have a number of solutions one of which is the "Thunderbay 8" which is a direct connect USB-C device that can be configured to different sizes. I currently use two 42 TB RAID-5 arrays to give me two copies of everything. I have storage for years to come.

neillaubenthal

Hi Suzanne…I concur with using OWC…I got one of their Thunderbay Mini's for my iMac Lightroom machine. It uses 2.5 inch drives instead of full size 3.5 inch drives so it might be a little slower than the regular Thunderbay but it's quiet and doesn't make any heat to speak of. I didn't really research the full size Thunderbay as I didn't need the capacity it provides and didn't want the noise/heat.

Don't forget though…RAID is not a backup so you'll still need to have both regular and off site backups of the images…I use BackBlaze for my offsite (cloud) backup as well as a couple of 2.5 inch USB Seagate that live in the cars so they're at least not in the. house in addition to locally attached backup drives.

rodolini

Thanks to everyone who has responded! Thought I'd give y'all an update...

I contacted Apple and they can't do a backup to 2 drives unless I manually disconnect the drives and switch them out so I would have to connect and back up Drive 1 and then disconnect those 2 drives and connect and back up Drive B. So that's a no go BUT using Disk Utility, I can set up RAID 0, RAID 1 or JBOD. I thought that is pretty interesting.

Apple also did not have any information about the RAID systems they sell because they aren't made by Apple.

Tried New Egg - they don't have any techs and can't give advice

Tried MacSales/Other World Computing - closed

B&H - closed

Adorama - closed

Best Buy - after 5 phone calls and multiple disconnects and transfers, I finally reached someone at the Geek Squad who actually knew what RAID is! Spent quite a bit of time with me and this is what we came up with - WD My Cloud PR4100 with Seagate Ironwolf 12T (the 16T aren't available...) it is only a 4 bay case so I was looking for larger drives but it is hard to find things right now.

I haven't purchased anything yet. I still want to contact some other places but at least I have one possible solution!

I guess I should also be looking at something like BackBlaze. I have shied away from it since the last time I looked at cloud storage, it was cost prohibitive.

I really appreciate everyone's advice and information. I feel like I am starting to understand this...

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

Call Mac Sales (OWC) Computing on Monday. Talk to them as they know Macs better then most. There are programs (apps) like GoodSync that can do what you want to accomplish.

The OWC ThunderBay series uses SoftRaid to build the RAID array which in this particular enclosure can hold up to 8 hard-drives. It is my understanding that soon Raid-6 (Double Redundancy) will be available. If you purchase this enclosure be sure to purchase HD's at the same time as they are much less expensive. I purchased two extra drives for each enclosure for future use. I don' think you have to populate the entire drive from the get go, but ask them.

david vt Loc: Vermont

First, I absolutely recommend waiting until you speak with OWL. They were incredibly helpful on my older MAC when I needed a docking station and working through a thunderbolt rev level compatibility issue. They are legendary when it comes to non-dealer Apple hardware support

Please update us on your journey as it progresses. While not a professional, and therefore not needing massively redundant systems with 100% uptime, I do need to do a better job with onsite and offsite (cloud?) backup of critical files and my (amateur) photo file library. Just want not to lose the files to a catastrophic event or ransomware attack.

As it relates directly to the topic of better backup system, is it possible to hang a RAID type system off of a cable modem/wifi hub (one that supports several different wifi networks), have that be a central household backup server for the 6 computers (mix of apple and windows) for the family, and then have a piece of sofware that regularly backs that up to the cloud (or other offsite secure storage)? I would like to find a way to protect the whole household at once, but not be physically lugging hardware in/out of the house.

Not trying to hijack the thread, but I think this is close enough to the OP’s desire for better backup to be relevant