I’m hoping it’s not to noisy and that I can mask the lights as it will be on my desk in our marital bedroom.
With 3 x 8TB HDDs which I intend to Raid, it should give me a bit of room to grow from the approx 9TB of data I currently hold on various discrete external HDDs.
Has anyone got any tips or insights for me on this model or in general?
I don’t have an answer for you, but what kinds of data do you have that requires 24 TB! Genuinely curious. Right now I have a 2TB external drive connected to my Mac Mini via TB4 but was eyeing another 2TB or so if prices drop back down.
I’m an old School windows server admin, because of this I have a preference to ensure that Operating Systems and Data remain on separate drives. It makes backups much cleaner and makes it easier to upgrade storage for the important stuff. The 24TB of disc space will actually be only 16TB of usable space when raided.
I have an M1 Mac Mini (256GB drive and 16GB of memory) which is used primarily as a Plex Server, to work in my photos library and also to backup all of that content to BackBlaze, I also sometimes do some personal projects on it.
I currently have a 500GB SSD for Photos which is getting full, a 5TB spinning drive for Films, Music & professional and personal data, and an 8TB spinning drive for TV shows.
Ideally, the photos would be on the internal SSD on a separate partition, but Apple’s upgrade prices are bonkers and my Photos SSD is running out of room, so I have a 1TB SSD waiting to make that change also.
Most of my data (aside from my photos) will be consolidated onto the new Enclosure. I may even test how acceptable performance of my photo library on the enclosure is.
N.b. After I have the Enclosure up and running with the 3 disks, I may even crack out the WD 8TB disc I already have and add it into the new enclosure to make 24TB of usable space.
I picked up this unit about two weeks ago and have a very similar setup to yours with my MacMini (although not using RAID). The unit I bought was a refurbished unit directly from OWC and from the start it had a slight buzzing noise when running. At first I thought it was the fan, but it seemed to be coming from the control board. I ended up moving mine to a nearby closet and use a 10ft USB C cable, which solved my problem. Other than that, I’ve been happy with it. The drive bays are extremely easy to install/remove and you can mix and match SSDs and HDDs.
I was a VAX/VMS system manager and pre-/post-sales consultant for a database company. My advice to (potential and actual) customers was always to spread the files the database used onto different drives but without putting all files of one type onto the same drive. Scatter them around if there were enough drives and better yet if those drives were on different controllers.
Not sure what my advice would be these days with SSDs (as there is no longer any rotational latency to overcome) but I might still suggest that different component files were spread across different storage devices (assuming that all the devices are all the same and connected at the same network although I might suggest that they located on different segments via different network controllers).
With Raid 5 or Raid 10 you should be able to spread the write across multiple physical drives which are part of the same Logical drive.
SSDs shouldn’t change this much and should be even better as there’s no need to write files contigously for retrieval, and no time required to move the drive head.
If the Disc controllers are smart enough, they should be able to write to all available physical disks at the same time.
I suppose the level you want to go to depends on the particulars of the database e.g. size, level of access, number of tables, number of users, age of the data, and access levels required of the database. Even a large database with minimal reads/writes wouldn’t benefit much from this if any.
Now if you want to get into database performance (and I dealt with some Sizable Oracle Databases). As much RAM as you can afford, heavily used tables being loaded into RAM and (I would guess now) stored on SSDs with slower discs for less used tables older activity logs, and archive information.
I really miss my old IT life when thinking about challenges such as this.
