Portable 4TB SSD deals

Rajan Parrikar
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p.3 #1 · p.3 #1 · Portable 4TB SSD deals

artsupreme wrote:
Nice. I have been looking for a Drobo 5D3 replacement because mine is on its last leg and could fail any day now. Seeing that this is an SSD unit, I would expect them to be more reliable than spinning drives. With these SSD raid units, when you buy the 16TB model does this mean you get 16TB of space or would you only get 8TB of space with raid?

Anyone else have experience with these? There's not a lot of TB4 options on the market but I would hope they catch up next year after the chip shortage.

I use it in RAID 0 so I have all the 16TB available.
One important caveat: Do not use the software (SoftRAID, I think it is called) provided by OWC. Instead, just use your Mac to format the RAID.

Nov 25, 2023 at 04:03 PM

Peter Figen
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p.3 #2 · p.3 #2 · Portable 4TB SSD deals

Chris Dees wrote:
Still Sandisk. I don’t take the risk at the moment as it’s unclear to me which SSD’s are affected or not.
I build my own; ACASIS Thunderbolt/ USB4 housing (about $90) and Samsung 990 Pro 4Tb (about $250).

I also used the Acasis enclosure but after researching drive units for it I settled on a 4TB Seagate Firecuda which is my main scratch disc for Photoshop and measures over 2800 MB/s with TechTool Pro, which seems to be about the practical limit for the bus speed.

Nov 25, 2023 at 06:06 PM

artsupreme
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p.3 #3 · p.3 #3 · Portable 4TB SSD deals

Rajan Parrikar wrote:
I use it in RAID 0 so I have all the 16TB available.
One important caveat: Do not use the software (SoftRAID, I think it is called) provided by OWC. Instead, just use your Mac to format the RAID.

Please explain for a newb who's not familiar with RAID. Does RAID 0 mean that you have a backup of everything on your 16TB drive so that if one drive fails you have a backup copy? If yes, that would mean you have 32gb of SSD and it's using 1/2 for a redundant backup?

Nov 25, 2023 at 07:55 PM

mcbroomf
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p.3 #4 · p.3 #4 · Portable 4TB SSD deals

artsupreme wrote:
Please explain for a newb who's not familiar with RAID. Does RAID 0 mean that you have a backup of everything on your 16TB drive so that if one drive fails you have a backup copy? If yes, that would mean you have 32gb of SSD and it's using 1/2 for a redundant backup?

No that's raid 1. ie 2 drives the same size and copies of each other, so eg, 2 x 8 or 2 x 16 (can also be done with any even number of drives (or maybe a jump from two to four and then 8). The Blade can take up to 8 I think)

Raid 0 is a striped configuration where data writing alternates between the 2 drives. So as Rajan said, all of his drives volumes are available. Raid 0 gives you no backup (drive to drive) but pools the 2 drives into 1 volume and also doubles (almost) the write speed with 2 drives (doubles again to 4 and again to 8) as the write is alternating. If one drives dies though everything is lost so you must have a full backup elsewhere.

Nov 26, 2023 at 05:31 AM

Rajan Parrikar
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p.3 #5 · p.3 #5 · Portable 4TB SSD deals

mcbroomf wrote:
No that's raid 1. ie 2 drives the same size and copies of each other, so eg, 2 x 8 or 2 x 16 (can also be done with any even number of drives (or maybe a jump from two to four and then 8). The Blade can take up to 8 I think)

Raid 0 is a striped configuration where data writing alternates between the 2 drives. So as Rajan said, all of his drives volumes are available. Raid 0 gives you no backup (drive to drive) but pools the 2 drives into 1 volume and also doubles (almost) the...Show more →

To Mike's excellent response, I will emphasise that using the array in RAID 0 requires you to have a robust backup regime in place.

Nov 26, 2023 at 06:41 AM

artsupreme
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p.3 #6 · p.3 #6 · Portable 4TB SSD deals

mcbroomf wrote:
No that's raid 1. ie 2 drives the same size and copies of each other, so eg, 2 x 8 or 2 x 16 (can also be done with any even number of drives (or maybe a jump from two to four and then 8). The Blade can take up to 8 I think)

Raid 0 is a striped configuration where data writing alternates between the 2 drives. So as Rajan said, all of his drives volumes are available. Raid 0 gives you no backup (drive to drive) but pools the 2 drives into 1 volume and also doubles (almost) the...Show more →

Got it, thanks for the explanation. I guess I'll just have to keep waiting it out until the price of SSD storage comes down. Right now I would need at minimum a 64TB RAID 1 setup to give me 32TB of SSD space. Maybe by 2025 we'll have a Thunderbolt 5 option with fairly reasonable pricing for a 64TB SSD setup.

Nov 26, 2023 at 07:02 PM

artsupreme
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p.3 #7 · p.3 #7 · Portable 4TB SSD deals

Rajan Parrikar wrote:
To Mike's excellent response, I will emphasise that using the array in RAID 0 requires you to have a robust backup regime in place.

Got it. I have everything backed up in 3 locations so I have numerous hard drives and I'm busting at the seams.

Nov 26, 2023 at 07:03 PM

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