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Author Topic: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?  (Read 6694 times)

tsinsf

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External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« on: April 03, 2014, 08:58:09 pm »

I will be upgrading soon to a Mac Pro and have a question about external hard drives. One of my biggest concerns is noise, and most of the multiple (3-5) drive enclosures available have some kind of noisy fan. I want to create a JBOD consisting of four 4TB drives, combining them into two 8TB units. I will use 8TB for storage and 8TB for backup using SuperDuper. Is there any disadvantage other than aesthetics, space, and wire tangles, to just piggy backing (via Thunderbolt) 4 separate drives as compared to a multiple unit enclosure? I don't need any RAID other than JBOD, which Mac OS can handle. This is assuming 4TB single drive units with out fans are a good idea. Thoughts?
« Last Edit: April 04, 2014, 01:07:44 am by tsinsf »
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StoneNYC

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #1 on: April 03, 2014, 11:11:30 pm »

I would look at SSD drives, that will cut your noise AND take advantage of thubderbolt, the spinning drives won't have any extra speed as they aren't spinning any faster.

Just my thoughts.
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tsinsf

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #2 on: April 03, 2014, 11:23:54 pm »

Great idea but not practical for the amount is storage I want.
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Schewe

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #3 on: April 04, 2014, 01:01:46 am »

Yeah, well, that could work...but realize that if you have 4 drives daisy chained you'll be relying on 4x the Thunderbolt connections and I for one don't love the TB2 connectors because it soooo easy to pull one out. There are some TH connector locks coming out...I would look into something like that.

BTW, my experience in multi-drive enclosures is the better ones are pretty quiet unless a fan bearing starts to go. The other advantage with TB2 is you can move the drives further away pretty easy.
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BernardLanguillier

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #4 on: April 04, 2014, 02:17:57 am »

My Promise Pegasus2 R8 is very quiet.

The air circulator 3m away in my studio is more noisy than Mac Pro + Pegasus2 located less than 1m away.

Cheers,
Bernard

jerryrock

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #5 on: April 04, 2014, 02:47:51 pm »

Yeah, well, that could work...but realize that if you have 4 drives daisy chained you'll be relying on 4x the Thunderbolt connections and I for one don't love the TB2 connectors because it soooo easy to pull one out. There are some TH connector locks coming out...I would look into something like that.

BTW, my experience in multi-drive enclosures is the better ones are pretty quiet unless a fan bearing starts to go. The other advantage with TB2 is you can move the drives further away pretty easy.

I agree about the Thunderbolt connectors, especially with the MacPro 6,1. The design looks cool but with the connections so closely spaced on the back of the unit, it seems that every time you need to turn or move the unit to plug in a new peripheral, a thunderbolt connector works itself loose.
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StoneNYC

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #6 on: April 04, 2014, 06:39:16 pm »

Yeah, well, that could work...but realize that if you have 4 drives daisy chained you'll be relying on 4x the Thunderbolt connections and I for one don't love the TB2 connectors because it soooo easy to pull one out. There are some TH connector locks coming out...I would look into something like that.

BTW, my experience in multi-drive enclosures is the better ones are pretty quiet unless a fan bearing starts to go. The other advantage with TB2 is you can move the drives further away pretty easy.

I tried, but isn't the idea that the TB speed doesn't change even chained? seed
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Schewe

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #7 on: April 04, 2014, 07:43:52 pm »

I tried, but isn't the idea that the TB speed doesn't change even chained? seed

I didn't say anything about speed...I was talking about increasing the cabling complexity and the fact that TB connectors don't normally allow locking. TB2 connections are less stable than USB or even FireWire connectors. If a connector to a series of daisy chained JBOD comes lose when writing, you'll have some serious problems on the drives. Just sayin'
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StoneNYC

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #8 on: April 04, 2014, 07:59:40 pm »

I didn't say anything about speed...I was talking about increasing the cabling complexity and the fact that TB connectors don't normally allow locking. TB2 connections are less stable than USB or even FireWire connectors. If a connector to a series of daisy chained JBOD comes lose when writing, you'll have some serious problems on the drives. Just sayin'

There's a TB2 now?

Thanks for the info that changes my plan for upgrading to TB
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Chris Kern

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #9 on: April 04, 2014, 08:00:33 pm »

There are some TH connector locks coming out...I would look into something like that.

I'm having difficulty imagining how these would work, but they can't come soon enough.  Will they work on the new Mac Pro?  As jerryrock pointed out, the cylindrical design makes it particularly susceptible to dislodging an unlatched connector.

Schewe

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #10 on: April 04, 2014, 08:29:16 pm »

There's a TB2 now?

The new MacPro (black) and the current shipping Macbooks all have Thunderbolt 2 which is 2x TB speed...they are compatible with TB1 devises and as far as I know, don't impact the speeds of other devices on the same chain.
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Schewe

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #11 on: April 04, 2014, 08:35:21 pm »

I'm having difficulty imagining how these would work, but they can't come soon enough.

Actually, it's the device that has the "lock"...I've seen a couple of raid units that have TB2 locking connectors. Not sure if there's a way of locking the TB2 cable into the MacPro.
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StoneNYC

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #12 on: April 04, 2014, 10:21:29 pm »

The new MacPro (black) and the current shipping Macbooks all have Thunderbolt 2 which is 2x TB speed...they are compatible with TB1 devises and as far as I know, don't impact the speeds of other devices on the same chain.

Thanks, I have a Mac book pro retina... But one of the first ones with retina... Not even sure which TB I have...
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Ellis Vener

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #13 on: April 06, 2014, 02:04:45 pm »

"One of my biggest concerns is noise, and most of the multiple (3-5) drive enclosures available have some kind of noisy fan."
I use a DROBO 5D (set up for dual redundancy and populated with 3 x 3TB HHD + 2 x 2TB HHD (all WD Red Drives) and it is very quiet, just a low  low frequency hum when it is really busy. I have it on my desk next to my computer.
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Manoli

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #14 on: April 06, 2014, 02:14:36 pm »

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Chris Kern

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #15 on: April 06, 2014, 06:13:14 pm »

"One of my biggest concerns is noise, and most of the multiple (3-5) drive enclosures available have some kind of noisy fan."  I use a DROBO 5D [ . . . ] and it is very quiet, just a low  low frequency hum when it is really busy. I have it on my desk next to my computer.

I use a Drobo 5N—as an archival and back-up device, not as a primary filestore—which I assume is the same enclosure as the 5D, and I'm also quite favorably impressed by how quiet it is.  Unfortunately, for those in an Apple OS X (or other UNIX environment), Drobo's implementation of the SMB file-sharing protocol is, to put it as charitably as possible, nonstandard. Although it runs on embedded Linux and uses the open-source Samba software suite to implement SMB, the Drobo's configuration automatically and quite nonsensically modifies the permission bits on files transferred from computers that employ a UNIX-style filesystem. So while the content of a file will be intact after a round-trip between a Mac and the Drobo, the file permissions won't be the same as they were before the file was stored on the Drobo. I have several other Samba-based file servers (and have used many more over the years), and this is the first one I have encountered that exhibits this pathology.

There are workarounds, including the NFS filing add-on I'm using, but they're not supported by Drobo.   I've been in contact with Drobo customer support about this issue and, while the company acknowledges this nonstandard behavior, the support reps I spoke to were not able to provide a schedule for fixing the problem—or even a commitment to do so.

BobShaw

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #16 on: May 05, 2014, 11:38:23 pm »

A little off the topic perhaps, but if your hard your data and your backup are on the same daisy chain then you don't really have backup. Presumably they are on the same power supply or same UPS. One power surge and they all gone.
The backup probably doesn't need to be at Thunderbolt speed. Mine is over a very slow ethernet to another building.
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TStanding

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #17 on: May 08, 2014, 12:04:57 pm »

There is one thing to keep in mind with longer cables, they will make small transfers slower.  Thunderbolt is so fast that the time it takes the signal to travel the distance of the cable starts to be important.  I tested 4 KB transfers and 4 MB to a SoftRAID volume over Thunderbolt using 0.5 and 2 meter cables.  For 4 KB transfers, the longer cables were 15% slower.  With 4 MB transfers, there was no measurable speed difference.  I would expect this speed difference to be much more pronounced with a 100 meter cable.  Without testing it, I don't know if it would be measurable with large transfers (e.g. 4 MB).

Tim Standing
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StoneNYC

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External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #18 on: May 08, 2014, 09:55:54 pm »

I can't even find any thunderbolt cable equipment, I've actually got a thunderbolt cable that I got for free from some random thing, what I want is a thunderbolt hub that would allow me to connect multiple USB cables as well as thunderbolt cables to a single thunderbolt port on my computer because of my USB ports are taken up and I hate using those hubs. But I can't seem to find a dual hub anywhere.

Scratch that... That is CHEAP and not $200
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westfreeman

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Re: External Thunderbolt HD question: multiple single drives?
« Reply #19 on: May 18, 2014, 10:22:47 pm »

this looks like and interesting idea

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/External-Drive/OWC/ThunderBay-IV

This will be on my list when I get a new Mac Pro ... some time in the future
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