Raid hard drive advice

robmneilson

robmneilson

Veteran
I'm currently torn (and ok with spending $2k on storage). Could anyone chime in with advice?

The 16tb older Gtech is on sale today: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/prod...ogy_0g03298_g_speed_studio_r_thunderbolt.html

And the 24TB Gtech XL is something I've had my eyes on: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1210927-REG/g_technology_0g04647_g_speed_shuttle_xl_24tb.html

Is there any reason I should not just buy two of the older versions for essentially the same price as the 24TB? Ideally I'll have one 16tb drive for completed projects and then the other 16tb for current work.
 
Hi Rob,

Which RAID mode do you intend to use? RAID 0 is the fastest and let's you use the full capacity of the drive, however if any ONE drive in the enclosure should fail, you will lose ALL DATA. Unless second unit is used for backup, RAID 0 makes me nervous.

To have some redundancy, while retaining most of the performance of RAID 0, you might consider RAID 5. This will decrease usable capacity by the size of one drive, so the 16TB unit (4x4TB) in RAID 5 would be 12TB, and the 24TB unit (8x3TB) would be 21TB. And of course, regardless of RAID mode employed, any hard drive will always format up smaller than advertised as well. 1000 vs 1024 bits/bytes business.

Thanks

Jeff
 
Hey Jeff thanks for your help....I have a ton of Gtech drives I'd like to clutter off my desk!

I figure I'll keep a 6TB G studio drive formatted Raid 0 to edit off of, and then have either the 24tb or two 16tb's as Raid 5 for backups. So that leaves me with the following questions

Is there any problem having a raid 5 with a 4 bay system?
I'll be upgrading to an imac pro (perhaps) soon, so does Thunderbolt 2 vs 3 matter too much?
 
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I've been using RAID 5 in a four bay system and it's been a life saver. If one drive goes down, just pull it out, shove in a new one without shutting down and let it rebuild. I have a 12tb RAID, 9tB usable in Raid 5, so it takes a good six to eight hours to totally rebuild, but you can still use your drive while it's doing that albeit with a performance hit.
 
Batutta said:
I've been using RAID 5 in a four bay system and it's been a life saver. If one drive goes down, just pull it out, shove in a new one without shutting down and let it rebuild. I have a 12tb RAID, 9tB usable in Raid 5, so it takes a good six to eight hours to totally rebuild, but you can still use your drive while it's doing that albeit with a performance hit.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this post Batutta, I am in the same boat as the OP, have a couple of RAID 0s but know I should be on a four drive RAID 5, just need to make and spend the money to do so. Your experience is helpful.
 
Well well well....my G Tech Studio R is being shipped back for a refund and I'm back to square one and asking for advice. I had two drives fail on the G Tech in the first day and it took 8 hours to rebuilt the RAID 5 despite having no information on it.

So do I abandon RAID 5 and just get a box with 5 4tb drives in it and mirror it to be 2x 10tb volumes? Or do I keep editing on my 6tb Raid 1 and offloading onto multiple 3tb drives for backup?
 
Batutta, that looks like a good solution. Are you PC based I assume? I'm OSX, but I don't see why this wouldn't work. Also, was the rebuild time fairly quick on raid 5?
 
I’m on OS X...rebuild time is dependent on the size of the hard drive. 4 tb takes about five hours.
 
Currently using an older OWC ThunderBay 4, which has been super ceded online by the ThunderBay IV with the newer Thunderbolt spec. I just ordered 4 new 5TB drives for it giving me 20TB of edit space. I'm running raid 0 with nightly backups. I have found raid 5 just too slow for my liking. And have also had multiple drives go bad at once leaving a shitpile in the wake.
 
We use a Promise Pegasus 12TB thunderbolt RAID hooked up to a Mac Pro Cylinder, had no problems at all with this one,
I've also had problems with G Tech drives in the past - their portable range, I wouldn't touch them again in a busy data critical environment.
**I use the mirrored RAID setting (1? I don't remember) giving me 6TB to work with, and offload finished FCPX libraries to 2 x mirrored cheaper USB3 4 TB drives
via Carbon Copy Cloner
 
Just bought yet another G-Tech G-Speed Studio R Thunderbolt 2 RAID array (12TB) and a spare drive caddy. Jigsaw24 here in the UK have them at an amazing price - about half what I paid for my last (identical) unit....Because they were designed to "match" my nMP ("Trashcan") I suspect they are being discontinued ahead of the new, new Mac Pro launch sometime next year. Other vendors (CVP etc.) are still showing a £1,500+ price on their websites.

Been using all G-Tech drives, their various RAID systems etc. for the last 9 years. I have many units and I've never had one fail on me yet (touch wood).

So if you live in the UK and you want one for Xmas...
 
G Tech has been pretty solid for me as well, have probably a dozen of their drives ranging from 2-4TB and they're still kicking when I boot them up. Dissapointed I had such a bad experience out of the box with the studio R. Perhaps the price reduction was for the rejects from the factory!
 
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