mac & raid

[stevesound]

hi there,

the time has come once again for me to upgrade my system. I'm currently on a 2008 Mac Pro, which is working fine but I'm getting the feeling it's not going to last much longer.

Just wanted to see if people are running the new Mac Pro with a Raid system, if you are how is it running? Did you go with a higher than normal spec mac? I'm trying to figure out how much I need to spend. Or are people using the mac previous to the newer (stupid looking) mac pro??

Any tips or warnings??

Thanks!
Steve

[Craig F]

what kind of RAID are you talking about for what kind of benefit are you looking for?

[stevesound]

Originally Posted by Craig F

what kind of RAID are you talking about for what kind of benefit are you looking for?

Not sure really. Just assumed something like a RAID drive bay would work best when you have one of those new macs (with limited storage in the box)?

[Craig F]

OK I see what your thinking, a multidrive box
I would go with something Thunderbolt and run it in JBOD mode
I do not have a recommendation on a specific brand

[Darryl Ramm]

I am not sure how you hope to get very useful advice if you provide absolutely no information about what you are using the system for. We have no idea what you hope to do with this sysem: 8 tracks in a bedroom or doing 100 track VI based movie compositions, 300 track movie post or what. Whether you don't use VIs at all or have many TB of samples online etc.

Given zero information: For lower performance needs (i.e. what many of us actually do with Pro Tools), if you don't need a lot of space just use the internal super fast PCIe SSD in the Mac Pro for everything, boot/samples/sessions etc.. Either way that disk is so fast and so good that most purchasers should max out the size of the SSD in the system they order. Or if you need even more storage get a _good_ model/spec SSD in a Thunderbolt JBOD box, either roll your own or a pre-built. Forget RAID, especially with SSDs. HDD only if you need a huge amount of storage for things like video or samples (but even for samples it's hard to argue against the just all around great performance of a good SSD). Now whether you should be using SATA or PCIe SSD for external storage, and how many drives you might need, is another whole question.

A very good pre-build high-performance PCie based SSD is the Lacie Little Big Disk 2 Thunderbolt. http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-Little-T.../dp/B00J2CDX06. If you are spending top $ on a Mac Pro trash can this is the kind of storage you need to do to get performance similar to the Mac Pro internal SSD. Whether you need that class of performance, for what you do, ... who knows.

[stevesound]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I am not sure how you hope to get very useful advice if you provide absolutely no information about what you are using the system for. We have no idea what you hope to do with this sysem: 8 tracks in a bedroom or doing 100 track VI based movie compositions, 300 track movie post or what. Whether you don't use VIs at all or have many TB of samples online etc.

Given zero information: For lower performance needs (i.e. what many of us actually do with Pro Tools), if you don't need a lot of space just use the internal super fast PCIe SSD in the Mac Pro for everything, boot/samples/sessions etc.. Either way that disk is so fast and so good that most purchasers should max out the size of the SSD in the system they order. Or if you need even more storage get a _good_ model/spec SSD in a Thunderbolt JBOD box, either roll your own or a pre-built. Forget RAID, especially with SSDs. HDD only if you need a huge amount of storage for things like video or samples (but even for samples it's hard to argue against the just all around great performance of a good SSD). Now whether you should be using SATA or PCIe SSD for external storage, and how many drives you might need, is another whole question.

A very good pre-build high-performance PCie based SSD is the Lacie Little Big Disk 2 Thunderbolt. http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-Little-T.../dp/B00J2CDX06. If you are spending top $ on a Mac Pro trash can this is the kind of storage you need to do to get performance similar to the Mac Pro internal SSD. Whether you need that class of performance, for what you do, ... who knows.

Hi there,

yes, you're dead right, apologies for the extreme vagueness of the query! I run sessions of about 30-40 tracks (I'm a composer for tv/film etc), with a huge amount of samples libraries/VIs and plugins. I need about 5TB of storage for sessions and sample libraries/samples etc, so figure a RAID type system would be necessary. Looking at the JBOD options now, seems like a good way to go.
thanks for the advice!

[stevesound]

Originally Posted by Craig F

OK I see what your thinking, a multidrive box
I would go with something Thunderbolt and run it in JBOD mode
I do not have a recommendation on a specific brand

thanks Craig, two votes for JBOD. Appreciate it!