New OWC 4 bay Thunderbolt drive

[nst7]

Just found out about this and it looks like a great solution. It's a 4 drive enclosure for either traditional drives or SSD's. You can buy just the enclosure or with various configurations. Considering it's Thunderbolt it's not much more than buying 4 separate firewire/usb enclosures:


http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thund.../ThunderBay-IV


They also have the new dual version as well, for 2 drives:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thund...lite-Dual-RAID


Note that both of these products include Thunderbolt cables.

[stevedemena]

It's $500 for no drives. For $680 you can get a 5D Drobo with five bays, Thunderbolt cable, optional SSD cache & the smarts of Drobo's style of RAID.

[nst7]

They're really 2 different types of products.

The Drobo does not allow you to configure it as independent drives, which the OWC does. That right there makes is useless for me and a lot of other people.

The Drobo is already $180 more, plus you need a Thunderbolt cable (which the OWC has), which adds another $50. The Drobo is a very specific type of product and more expensive.

My comparison was to high quality enclosures like the Mercury Elite Pro which is firewire/usb, and is $90 just for the enclosure. If you wanted 4 independent enclosures you'd be looking at $360 right there. This is a little more but with Thunderbolt speed and bandwidth.

[stevedemena]

I believe the Drobo 5D includes a Thunderbolt cable now, despite what may be listed on their web site. Many Google reviews mention this and I think the black one I'm using came with mine.
Using it with a new Mac Pro.
It is awesome & so much faster than their terrible models from 3-4 years ago.

[Darryl Ramm]

As has been mentioned on DUC a few times before, I would stay well away from Drobo products. Their proprietary RAID is a non-starter for me. Don't want to be forced to use it/unable to configure the disks an JBOD and certainly don't want any disk/volume recovery relying on needing another Drobo box (but yes if you have backups to something else then fine). But its more worrying of a Drobo box *is* the backup device.

And as if you care about performance you start with an SSD. Not many audio applications (outside of video work) require massive online storage and you can do an awful lot with say a single 1TB audio/session SSD.

With the extra RAID stuff the Drobo is doing it would be great if somebody like Anadtech would do one of their typical detailed performance review of the RAID box, especially with known fast SSDs installed like the Samsung 840 Evo/Pro. Without that I'm concerned that any (fancier) RAID system adds overhead to an already fast and very reliable SSDs.

[stevedemena]

"don't want any disk/volume recovery relying on needing another Drobo box"

Why would you need another Drobo box? Just replace the failed disk or disks (if you setup two disk parity) and it will rebuild. Also an easy way to increase space. Just swap disks with larger ones.

Any sort of RAID is not designed to be an alternative to backups. I backup my pro tools projects offsite to Crashplan and onsite to two synology NAS units.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by stevedemena

"don't want any disk/volume recovery relying on needing another Drobo box"

Why would you need another Drobo box? Just replace the failed disk or disks (if you setup two disk parity) and it will rebuild. Also an easy way to increase space. Just swap disks with larger ones.

Any sort of RAID is not designed to be an alternative to backups. I backup my pro tools projects offsite to Crashplan and onsite to two synology NAS units.

You need another Drobo box when the Drobo box itself breaks. If that happens your disks are useless without one of their proprietary boxes, maybe even the same model box (don't know). With a JBOD or other software RAID based box your disks are interchangeable (and importantly with a JBOD can be read outside of any very simply by just hooking them up to SATA or SAS or whatever controller in the computer, even a USB to SATA adapter able. All stuff that may be very useful when the [bleep][bleep][bleep][bleep] really hits the fan.

You have to backup to something and lots of folks want to do at lease some of their backups to network/NAS boxes, which say with Time Machine for user files is a great plan (combined with bootable image backups images). If backing up to a Drobo NAS box all this is more of an issue and something that anybody using a Drobo box need to think about and decide if the box is a good fit for what they want.

I believe some or all the Drobo boxes support EFI firmware and so are bootable, which counts in their favor against some other RAID/JBOD boxes, but for my money I'd find a EFI/boot compatible box that supports standard software RAID/JBOD.

Traditional RAID or what Drobo do (which they claim is unique) are pretty much undesirable with SSDs. It really adds nothing in terms of reliability and often impacts performance. There is technology coming that does more RAID type things targeted specifically at SSDs, so this story is all likely to change (but none of it is likely to look like traditional RAID boxes).

And I'd still like to see good performance data for these boxes (and same goes for most other external RAID boxes).

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by nst7

Just found out about this and it looks like a great solution. It's a 4 drive enclosure for either traditional drives or SSD's. You can buy just the enclosure or with various configurations. Considering it's Thunderbolt it's not much more than buying 4 separate firewire/usb enclosures:


http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thund.../ThunderBay-IV


They also have the new dual version as well, for 2 drives:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thund...lite-Dual-RAID


Note that both of these products include Thunderbolt cables.

I wonder how loud the fan is? If it's quiet enough I can see people with small studio space jumping on this.
Is it temperature controlled or constant speed?

[nst7]

It says something about having an aluminum enclosure that uses heat dissipation to keep in cool. It also has lots of ventilation holes.

However, looking at the back of the unit, it clearly has a fan. Maybe it only comes on if it needs to. I may call OWC and ask about this.

[JFreak]

Yes it has a fan, but most importantly, IT HAS AN INTERNAL POWER SUPPLY :) :) :)