I already partially asked this question but as I continue to try to think it through, I'd like to rephrase and re-ask it if my LULA colleagues will permit.
The four 8 TB drives in my Thunderbay IV (Thunderbolt 2) are getting close to full. It’s attached to my 2013 Mac Pro (64GB OWC RAM, 1TB SSD).
In the Thunderbay IV, I have a “Photos” drive, two backups of it and a backup of my SSD. All backups are done each night with Carbon Copy Cloner. I have other off-site backups of the photos and the boot SSD.
I have some older drives purchased as I gradually worked myself up to the 8's. I like to have all my photos in one place, with multiple backups of course.
Would a RAID (eg 3 6TB drives using RAID 5 [Soft Raid] giving a 12TB capacity) be faster than a single drive or should I bite the bullet and get some larger drives, eg 10 or 12 TB? My other option, as I spend endless hours thinking this through, is just a plain RAID 0, I know this provides no protection against disk failure, but my current system doesn't either.
At this point I’d prefer to do whatever will be faster for Photoshop saves. I’ve done a bit of web searching and it is not clear to me whether RAID 5, or any RAID configuration, would be significantly faster than a single disk for PS saves. I could get a new Thunderbay 4 (Thunderbolt 3) with Soft Raid and keep all my backups in the boxes even if I used one of the Thunderbays for the RAID. This would be forwardly compatible with whatever my next computer would be (iMac 2019, or new modular Mac Pro if it’s affordable).
With RAID 0, should my "Photos" disk fail, I'd be left with my backups the oldest of which would be from last night. A RAID 0 should be faster than my current system which writes my Photoshop files to the "Photos" disk. I do not earn money with my photos, I'm an avid amateur, a retired bum who puts almost as much energy into my photo passion as I did to my previous profession. The loss of even a full day's work would be frustrating but not tragic.
Thanks to all.
Eric