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.
Assembly with the drives is so easy, You use the provided screws with alu trays, it’s a 2 minute job per drive. It feels solid and high quality, they then just slot in. It’s supposedly hot swap too
Softraid is easy to use. You initialise each drive in the unit (they show up in Softraid as separate drives) and then select the drives to create whatever Raid you want. I’ve set it up as a Raid 5.
NOTE though, softraid is free with a 30 day trial of premium. I believe you need premium to do some of the higher level functions like raid 5. I’m hoping that when the free trial of premium ends, the Raid 5 will still work. If it doesn’t it’s $150 for the first year and then $80 a year. You can use Softraid with other disks too though, so if you wanted to use 2 standalone external drives as a Raid 1, you could.
I actually ordered a 4th 8TB drive and have setup a 4 disk raid 5 volume. At 24TB it should last me quite a while (Blimey I remember an old boss being excited when we ordered a new file server with 27GB of storage back in 1998, it cost us a fortune at the time.)
The unit seems really quiet. I can’t hear the fan, but I can hear the drive read/writes. I could happily live with this on my desk, whether Mrs Airey will be happy with it in the bedroom, we’ll see if she notices.
I have an M1 Mac Mini which I believe has Thunderbolt 3/USB 4 up to 40Gb per second. Watching the transfer from my other drives I’m seeing things vary between about 80-140MB per second, but this is from Spinning drives to spinning drives, and one of them goes through a USB A hub.
What will give me an idea of real use will be when I try running a photo library from it. If I can I can remove 3 drives from my desk, if I can’t it’ll only be 2 removed, but still a real change and a much tidier area
I don’t know why I assumed raid software would be free. I guess that is another positive of a NAS/Synology, the software is all part of the package with no subscription fees.
Sorry if I missed it, but what kind of drives are you using? I am using Seagate Ironwolf (NAS drives), the thing is stashed in a closet, and I can still hear it anywhere in my condo if it is quiet. Not enough to be a problem, but they are loud.
Do you somehow stream your photos to your iPhone? That’s my greatest challenge right now. I love the photos app but I don’t want to have to pay for 2TB when I am just going over 200GB.
I happily pay for the 2TB plan. Not just for photos for also for File syncing.
The fact I have all my photos in my pocket from anywhere in the world (with a download) and Apple’s hosting and security teams look after them is worth the money.
I love the photos app but I don’t want to have to pay for 2TB when I am just going over 200GB.