# Recommendations for external storage/chassis for upcoming 2013 Mac Pro



## stillcd (Nov 16, 2013)

With the upcoming release of the new redesigned Mac Pro, I am curious about what external storage options you guys would recommend (since the internal bays are going away)

I do plan to purchase a new Mac Pro sometime in the near future, but I am very curious about how composers will deal with the reduction in storage capacity for sample libraries. I am all for the PCIe flash in the new mac pros, which will dramatically improve performance, but this surely means that composers will definitely have to rely on some sort of external storage device/chassis to carry the vast amount of sample libraries that can accrue. From a few web searches, I see that there are external thunderbolt raid options from Drobo and western digital, etc, but what do you guys recommend in order to have adequate storage for sample libraries, provide exceptional performance, and be the most cost effective? 

This topic doesn't have to be focused necessarily on just the Mac Pro, but rather, it can relate to the general usage of external storage bay options and it's use with any computer being used as a DAW machine. So suggestions are welcomed from a variety of different viewpoints and perhaps more people will benefit from this thread. 

Personally, I am a Mac guy all the way, and do not wish to use windows. Logic Pro X is my DAW of choice. 

Thanks in advance!

Cody


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## charlieclouser (Nov 17, 2013)

For sample storage I'm liking the looks of the Pegasus J4 - the size of a Mac Mini, holds 4x 2.5" SSD drives in RAID or JBOD mode, internal power so no wall-wart, dual TB ports. $379 empty. Loaded with 4x 500gb SSD drives you'll wind up at under $2500 for 2tb of what would appear to be ridiculously fast sample streaming. No heat, no fans, no moving parts - that's what I want from my next-generation rigs. I'll use big cheap spinning drives for backup and archiving but I'll keep them off-line and try to transition everything in my new rig to SSD. Put a few of them on the main Logic cylinder, and one on each Mac Mini VEP slave, and you're loving life 2tb at a time.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Promise% ... gy/PRJ4US/

The same guys also make TB raid boxes that Apple has been recommending and selling on the Apple Store for some time, so that would appear to be a safe choice if you want some big terabytes and spinning discs in RAID setups. $2,500 for 12tb.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Promise% ... y/PR602US/

I've never liked the smell of the Drobo stuff - one guy I know has one of the first ones and it just seemed kind of plastic-y and cheap, and there is something scary to me about what appeared to be a non-standard multi-drive RAID implementation, which may not be an issue anymore… but still. 

The Promise stuff looks nice and sturdy, with a metal chassis and correct (2-port) TB implementation - and it's been in the Apple Store for years now.

It really looks like SSD is the way to go for primary storage, with archiving to multiple copies on cheap spinning drives - I still archive to 3 sets of spinning discs and keep two sets here and one set back at my sister's house in Vermont. I use a simple NewerTech Voyager Q dock - it connects via Firewire and you drop raw drive mechanisms into it like a toaster - and I have Pelican cases with foam cutouts for raw drives that I use to hold and transport the archive sets.

http://www.wiebetech.com/products/cases.php


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## stillcd (Nov 17, 2013)

charlieclouser,

Thanks so much for the info! I've seen those Pegasus systems before but I completely forgot about them. I did fail to mention in my first post that SSD implementation is a top priority due to exponential increases in sample streaming speeds, so I am glad that you elaborated on that in your post. I will definitely be checking into purchasing one of those in the near future. 

Cody


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## AC986 (Nov 17, 2013)

The J4 looks like a good solution. Any recommendations on the ssd make of drive you would put in it?


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## stillcd (Nov 17, 2013)

I too am interested in hearing some suggestions for SSDs. So far I have seen the offerings from OWC, Crucial, and samsung. Purchasing Samsung SSDs through Newegg or Amazon seems to be the least expensive option. I'm pretty new to the utilization of SSD, so I would definitely like to know if any certain brands are better than others, and what to look for.

Cody


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## AC986 (Nov 17, 2013)

Just been reading up on the subject and I'm no expert but Crucial look pretty good £ for £ or $ for $.


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## charlieclouser (Nov 17, 2013)

I have a couple of SSDs from OWC, mainly because they were the only ones I could find that were 1tb in the 2.5" form factor - but they are SATA2 3gb/sec, not the current SATA3 6gb/sec. That's okay for now as these are in a Mac Pro tower which only has SATA2 anyway. There seem to be very few SSDs that are larger than 500gb, but I am hoping that will change soon-ish. Somewhere I heard that the OWC 1tb SSD was just two 500gb cards stuffed into one enclosure, so maybe the controller chip they use only supports 500gb? Who knows.

So far I have had no problems with the OWC drives. Samsung are really running away with the market share, so the 840 series or 840 pro seems to be the popular models. Intel receive good reviews on durability and write cycles but their price is slightly higher and they seem to come in strange sizes - maybe they use their own controller chips? Crucial also seem to get love from the review websites…

Next time around I'll probably go with Samsung unless someone else starts shipping larger capacity drives.

But, yeah… the J4 does look like an elegant solution. When I get my cylinder Mac Pro I'll definitely get a J4 and see how it goes.


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## AC986 (Nov 17, 2013)

Cheers Charlie for the advice. I have decided t go for the J4 as you suggested and checkout the ssd makes. 

The new MacPro is out of my league, but I am surprised that it doesn't come with internal SSDs at its price.

How's the keyboard playing going Charlie? :D


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## stillcd (Nov 17, 2013)

From some of the research I've done today, it seems like the Samsung 840 Pro is regarded as the best SSD by many of the tech review sites on the web. I would say that grouping the 512gb versions of these would make a good team with the Pegasus J4

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 0AJ1045276


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## ryanstrong (Nov 17, 2013)

charlieclouser @ Sun Nov 17 said:


> For sample storage I'm liking the looks of the Pegasus J4 - the size of a Mac Mini, holds 4x 2.5" SSD drives in RAID or JBOD mode, internal power so no wall-wart, dual TB ports. $379 empty. Loaded with 4x 500gb SSD drives you'll wind up at under $2500 for 2tb of what would appear to be ridiculously fast sample streaming. No heat, no fans, no moving parts - that's what I want from my next-generation rigs. I'll use big cheap spinning drives for backup and archiving but I'll keep them off-line and try to transition everything in my new rig to SSD. Put a few of them on the main Logic cylinder, and one on each Mac Mini VEP slave, and you're loving life 2tb at a time.
> 
> http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Promise% ... gy/PRJ4US/



Wow this is the thing that I've been looking for!

Did you say you have one Charlie? I wonder how it shows up on your Mac once you plug it in? Do all individual drives pop up, or is it just one big giant drive?


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## rJames (Nov 17, 2013)

Charlie or anybody here,
Have you guys studied what will be the fastest data movement with Thunderbolt?

Does RAID provide double the speed access? I remember that back in the SATA 2 days, RAID did not provide speed bump in audio. Seems to me that was the case. RAID did provide speed for video editors though.

I like where this conversation is going but really just want to know if anyone has researched this yet, can you link me to the tests/info, what are you planning?

Is thunderbolt external going to be just as fast as the old internal buss?

Or should we just get a DAW machine and then some external PCs? (I'd rather have Mac but know that what I decided in this coming month will affect me for a few years)

Thanks,

Ron


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## milesito (Nov 17, 2013)

I like the concept but if you need 2TB of memory and use 4 500GB drives, could you use and would you use Raid 0 or Raid 1?


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## charlieclouser (Nov 18, 2013)

I don't have the J4 yet. I will get one when I move to the cylinder unless something slicker is out there. I believe the J4 can do RAID as well as JBOD. TB should be faster than the existing Mac Pro SATA2 but we shall see.


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## rJames (Nov 18, 2013)

milesito @ Sun Nov 17 said:


> I like the concept but if you need 2TB of memory and use 4 500GB drives, could you use and would you use Raid 0 or Raid 1?



Per my reading this morning, RAID 0 seems to be splitting the data onto 2 drives so that are pulling half of the data stream from 1 and half from the other... should be twice as fast; especially for heavy data single streams i.e. video.

RAID1 seems to be a redundancy system so that you do everything twice and you have backup.

My question is whether anyone actually knows by experience if RAID0 will do anything positive for VI composers.

We are not using one big stream that is a giant per millisecond stream.

We are pulling hundreds of seeks and a tiny bit of data per each seek. It almost seems like RAID0 would hurt because you are taking 2 seeks for each voice.


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## playz123 (Nov 18, 2013)

I will be using this:

http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/prod ... cmultidock

with four 960 GB Crucial SSDs.

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=7869891&tab=7&cm_mmc=Email-_-WebletMain-_-CANLET-_-03ship&SRCCODE=CANLET (http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/ ... ODE=CANLET)

With this unit, drives are easily swappable. I have no intention of investing in any more really small size SSDs although they do have merit sometimes.

I'm currently trying to find a suitable external PCIe card (x2 or x3) enclosure cabled via Thunderbolt. There are not a lot of options yet. Waiting for RAM suppliers to offer suitable products as well. Buy a new Mac Pro...get less for more dollars.


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## ryanstrong (Nov 18, 2013)

playz123 @ Mon Nov 18 said:


> I will be using this:
> 
> http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/prod ... cmultidock



Any differences between that and the J4? Looks like maybe the the Magic Multidock can easily swap the drives without being 'taken apart'?


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## charlieclouser (Nov 18, 2013)

One slight issue with the Black Magic Multidock is that it only has one TB port, so no daisy-chaining. This probably won't be much of an issue with the new Mac Pro as it has six TB ports, but still. Also I don't think the Multidock does any RAID configurations, I think it's JBOD only - which is fine for me.

The hot-swap ability on the Multidock is pretty cool, if you need to keep projects on SSD and move between them on a daily basis. The J4 won't let you do that really - it's more of a set-and-forget rig. I don't know how often (if ever) I'd really be swapping SSDs that held sample libraries - back when I used SCSI rack mounts and SyQuests and all that I couldn't wait to get a single storage solution that would just let me keep EVERYTHING online at all times instead of popping cartridges in and out looking for the right data - so I probably won't go for the Multidock.

I never really liked messing with RAID - having a bunch of drives that all need to be there in good working order if you want to get to your data is sort of like the old days of running multiple ADAT or DA-88 machines - three tapes and three machines for 24 tracks. One tape or machine goes bad and the whole multitrack is no longer recoverable. 

I had an Apple X-Serve RAID (yes, the $13,000 one that only had 5.6tb) and besides being loud it was a bit scary to use - it was really intended for large-scale installations where you'd have spare drive and power supply modules and be constantly monitoring the thing for mission-critical 24/7 uptime. So… kind of overkill and not really suited for a private composer studio situation.


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## playz123 (Nov 18, 2013)

Check out the link and scroll down the page. The Multidock does indeed do Raid.


Flexible RAID Storage
Combine 4 super fast SSDs into one super fast storage volume

If you need fast storage then Blackmagic MultiDock can be instantly configured into a multi disk RAID simply by plugging in multiple disks and using your disk utility software to "stripe" the disks into a single fast storage volume. Mac OS X and Windows include disk utility software with RAID support so you can stripe your disks for super fast storage, perfect for Ultra HD and 4K editing, effects and color correction work. If you use the latest SATA 3 solid state disks you can get massive performance of over 500 MB per second! Because Blackmagic MultiDock allows the disks to be unplugged, you can even unplug and store or unplug and move your RAID to another Blackmagic MultiDock as you need!


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## Saxer (Nov 20, 2013)

http://www.magma.com/roben-3ts


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## tabulius (Nov 21, 2013)

There are also these: http://www.caldigit.com/products.asp


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## rgames (Nov 21, 2013)

rJames @ Mon Nov 18 said:


> My question is whether anyone actually knows by experience if RAID0 will do anything positive for VI composers.


The benchmarks I've seen say that it does not. There have been some other threads on this topic and the data that emerges in them supports your suspicion that RAID doesn't do much for sample streaming.

It helps for video because you have only a few large streams. For samples, though, you need a *lot* of smaller streams, so the ability to manage those *lots* of smaller streams becomes a factor and RAID winds up being mostly a wash.

The part I'm curious about is the external interface. A big part of the advantage of SSD's is the seek time. If you have an external interface, you have additional seek time to get through that interface. Again, if you're managing only a few large streams (as in video) it probably doesn't matter but for sample streaming I could see it being a significant performance hit.

Even though you can get the same bandwidth over Thunderbolt or USB 3 or whatver you might run in to problems because of increased seek time.

Unfortunately nobody measure number of streaming voices - which is what we care about - everyone measures read speeds. That probably makes sense for video editing but not for sample streaming.

rgames


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## rJames (Nov 21, 2013)

And I've been looking into seek times with thunderbolt, sad, but can't find much.

I've read that there are differences in thunderbolt controllers but can't find anything on which are better or what boxes use what controller.

This is what we should be thinking about when looking at these boxes, not RAID.

Anyone have any insight into this on the boxes they are recommending?


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## MMMusic (Nov 23, 2013)

Hey guys - haven't posted for a long time here, but when I saw this thread about the Pegasus J4 I had to chime in.

I've been using the J4 (with 4 Intel 250gb drives) since last december. I bought the unit excactly when it came out - it was kind of a gamble - but it has been extremely reliable and very fast.

I haven't raided the drives, but obviously use it as sample drives.

If you want to mirror the drives, a cool solution would be to have 2 ssd's and 2 normal hd's, and then mirror your sample drives to the cheaper hd-drives.

Only 'not-so-cool'-thing is, that you cannot (yet) boot from the J4.

That you can do from the J2, which I also bought last year, which is a great little unit too. I use it for live gigs but also for LASS. It's not quite as fast as the J4 but extremely handy (and expensive…)

best
Mathias


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## rJames (Nov 25, 2013)

You ever get that feeling that the more you learn the less you know? (because as you learn you realize how much more there is to know to "master" a subject)

Same with thunderbolt.

The MacPro will have thunderbolt2 but the Pegasus J4 is thunderbolt1 so it is not nearly as fast as thunderbolt2. Does that matter with JBOD? 

Still not finding an definitive answer on whether RAID0 is faster. The experts all say yes, the techy guys that I asked on the NI forums say not really. My logic still tells me that all of the charts which show sustained throughput are not aware of thousands of samples streaming at once, each with a different address that is not contiguous.

But is sustained throughput ANY different than thousands of samples? Is the CPU just asking for chunk after chunk using new addresses to access the fat video stream exactly like asking for chunk after chunk of sample data?

Pegasus J4 Thunderbolt 10Gps
Pegasus2 Thunderbolt2 20Gps

It's just getting more confusing.


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## rJames (Dec 6, 2013)

BUMP

Love to get you Mac guys opinion on Thunderbolt2.

The Blackmagic box is also Thunderbolt1.

I'm getting less and less sold on the new Mac Pro though I was/am planning to get one.

Not sure of the advantage since Thunderbolt 2 seems to be it. 

Any more discussion here??


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## Greg (Dec 6, 2013)

playz123 @ Mon Nov 18 said:


> I will be using this:
> 
> with four 960 GB Crucial SSDs.



I just saw those same drives on a black friday sale for $440.00 ea. Just fyi, don't want you to over pay 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=390711367805 (http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dl ... 0711367805)


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## samphony (Dec 6, 2013)

A friend of mine is using these

http://www.onnto.com/product.asp?sys_sysno=101

He's pretty happy. 

@charlieclauser

Where did you got 32Gb for your Mac mini from?


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## charlieclouser (Dec 6, 2013)

I think you mis-read something somewhere - I don't have 32Gb in my Mac Mini. I have a SSD i7 Mini but it's just a video slave and I'm not even sure how much RAM it has… probably 16.


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## colony nofi (Dec 14, 2013)

I have recently got a j4 with 2xcrucial 960 ssds and 2 x hitachi 1tb spinning drives - both as raid 0 pairs.

My initial usage this week shows that although max throughout isn't increased hugely, using the raid0 ssds has improved load times approx 30y over an old single crucial m4 512gb drive. And I've been able to set the preload in Kontakt marginally lower without system probs. The random I/o count you get with ssds in raid 0 is off the chart. A friend runs four of these same ssds in a j4 - and it's again faster than mine - but not in just general sequential read/writes. 

Strangely, mine only does 660mb/s compared to others with the same system who have reached over 800 (which is close to the limit with thunderbolt1) - but I'm still very happy.

For us, thunderbolt2 is no real big deal unless you have a very large array of ssds in raid 0 or raid 5/6. 

These are solid units with great possibilities for use. And not as expensive as you would think


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## tabulius (Dec 14, 2013)

I read that Pegasus 2 series have been released (I haven't seen these in Finland yet): http://www.promise.com/promotion_page/promotion_page.aspx?region=en-global&rsn=100

But it's hard to say how much a difference does the thunderbolt 2 make in the real world and in sample streaming..

IF I'll get a Mac Pro or iMac next year I think I'll choose the J4 or similar box that supports 3-4 SSDs.


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## Wunderhorn (Dec 14, 2013)

charlieclouser @ Sun Nov 17 said:


> ... No heat, no fans, no moving parts - that's what I want from my next-generation rigs. I'll use big cheap spinning drives for backup and archiving but I'll keep them off-line and try to transition everything in my new rig to SSD. Put a few of them on the main Logic cylinder, and one on each Mac Mini VEP slave, and you're loving life 2tb at a time.
> 
> http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Promise% ... gy/PRJ4US/




Well, unfortunately, the thing does have a fan. And in my experience I have learned to stay away from companies that don't guarantee a very low noise pollution measured in dB in their advertising.

Until I know more, I will consider getting a few single drive enclosures that do not need any fan. I really don't need RAID functionality, I just want a drive bay. Basically what the previous Mac Pro offered - built in by default.


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## Wunderhorn (Dec 14, 2013)

Here is an example for a 2-bay RAID enclosure WITHOUT fan:
http://www.thephoblographer.com/2012/08 ... -duo-6-tb/

The only downside seems that they do not sell it just as a bare enclosure, you always have to buy with drives included.


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## Symfoniq (Dec 14, 2013)

Also consider the Areca ARC-8050. Larry Jordan has a review here.


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## Symfoniq (Dec 14, 2013)

Wunderhorn @ Sat Dec 14 said:


> Until I know more, I will consider getting a few single drive enclosures that do not need any fan. I really don't need RAID functionality, I just want a drive bay. Basically what the previous Mac Pro offered - built in by default.



It seems like there must be a market for a JBOD Thunderbolt enclosure that is sold without drives (I know I was in that market before I threw in the towel and built a PC). With SSDs being so fast, RAID wasn't on my wish list, either. But with few Thunderbolt enclosures on the market, Apple has made it very difficult to do something that used to be very simple.


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