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by Wildflower-nut on Wed Nov 20, 2019 11:28 am
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For the last 10 years, I've used a DROBO esata raid to have my photos on and work off of it with photoshop.  These are backed up to a second DROBO on site which permits roll back and WD mybook for off site storage.  I'm now looking to replace it.  Photos take up about 8tb now and with the new cameras, the rate of storage need increase each year is expected to increase.

One approach is to use a large internal drive say 12-14 TB and back it up to a G technology raid 5 thunderbolt 3.

Another would be to continue what I've been doing with two raid 5 thunderbolt 3 and work directly off one of them.

I'm a single user with a single computer and for that reason I've not been looking at NAS

The puget sounds system I'm looking at has thunderbolt 3.  The G technology raid is thunderbolt 3.  Does windows support it at thunderbolt 3 speeds or is it dummy down to usb 3.1?



Thoughts. 
 

by E.J. Peiker on Wed Nov 20, 2019 6:11 pm
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Windows has no problem running a device at TB speeds as long as the computer has true TB built in and not just USB 3.1.

Here is an article that might be helpful:
https://www.newegg.com/insider/whats-so-special-about-thunderbolt-3/
 

by Wildflower-nut on Wed Nov 20, 2019 8:16 pm
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E.J. Peiker wrote:Windows has no problem running a device at TB speeds as long as the computer has true TB built in and not just USB 3.1.

Here is an article that might be helpful:
https://www.newegg.com/insider/whats-so-special-about-thunderbolt-3/


Gigabyte Z390 DesignareMotherboard which is supposed to have 2 thunderbolt 3 ports built in the way I read the specs
 

by E.J. Peiker on Thu Nov 21, 2019 7:30 am
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Wildflower-nut wrote:
E.J. Peiker wrote:Windows has no problem running a device at TB speeds as long as the computer has true TB built in and not just USB 3.1.

Here is an article that might be helpful:
https://www.newegg.com/insider/whats-so-special-about-thunderbolt-3/


Gigabyte Z390 DesignareMotherboard which is supposed to have 2 thunderbolt 3 ports built in the way I read the specs
The specs for the MB say that it's the full 40GB/s:
https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherboard/Z390-DESIGNARE-rev-10#kf
 

by Wildflower-nut on Thu Nov 21, 2019 9:33 pm
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I've been looking at internal drive for photos vs the g-technology 4 drive raid 5 thunderbolt 3.  It looks like the way I read it the transfer rate is higher with the gtech thunderbolt 3 (according to mr google's tests with raid 5) plus I get the security of raid 5 and more capacity.  Of course I may be interpreting the numbers wrong.

I then can backup the raid with a large wd elements disk or the owc 4 drive raid 5 thunderbolt 3.  the one large disk is cheaper of course but slower usb 3.   The owc is cheaper and can be had in a larger size for less money than g-technology but is probably a downgrade.  (Hardware vs software raid and different drives)
The larger size of the backup drive allows for backup and roll back.

Offsite is a big elements disk.

Comments?

I'm looking more at backing up the raid with a large elements disk instead of the owc drive.  It is a cheaper backup and the g-technology drive has enterprise grade drives so in theory failure is more remote.  As long as only one drive fails in the raid I don't need the second backup and 2 failures at one time should be extremely remote.  I'm going with the g-technology as the controller is hardware in the drive itself rather using windows software on the computer with owc.


Last edited by Wildflower-nut on Fri Nov 22, 2019 6:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 

by photoman4343 on Fri Nov 22, 2019 3:47 pm
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I just had Microcenter here in Houston build me a photo desktop. The motherboard supports thunderbolt and the tech recommended it just for the reasons you mentioned.

The specific motherboard is GIGABYTE GTX1660TI GVN166TWF2OC6GD

I decided to install two 12 TB internal drives along with a 1 TB SSD,

Right now I do not have a NAS or use Drobo even though he recommended that.

Joe
Joe Smith
 

by Wildflower-nut on Fri Nov 22, 2019 7:41 pm
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I'm going with raid 5 for 3 reasons. First is speed. It is striped data so it is in a better position to keep up with the thunderbott 3 connection. It looks to be about 2x faster than the internal 7500rpm drive. With files in photoshop getting bigger and bigger.... Second is size. It can be built to massive capacities. Right now I have about 8TB of files. I have taken 750GB more this year. Yes, editing would get rid of 90% of those but..... Third if a drive fails, it can be rebuilt from the remaining drives and I have had a drive fail over the years.

I've stayed away from mirrors in case an error occurs that corrupts the drive as the mirror simply becomes another corrupted copy. I prefer to copy it off using a backup system which permits roll back. I run this manually periodically.
 

by Wildflower-nut on Sun Nov 24, 2019 8:51 pm
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I'm going to give it a stab. I'd feel more comfortable is someone else would answer this as I'm no expert. The operating system on my new computer is on a SSD as is the scratch file etc. SSD is too much money for storage of the raw files (8TB worth and growing) so a spinning drive is required. In a raid 5, the data is stripped so that it is spread across multiple drives. To retrieve a file you are more or less reading from all of them at once so to speak which greatly reduces the read time. The equivalent of one drive in the system is consumed with parity information which allows the system to recreate a drive if one fails. Write time is not as fast as the read as the parity bit has to be calculated and saved. This computation is either done in software by the computer or hardware in the raid. I used drobo raids in the past connected by esata and I'm replacing them with the newer thunderbolt 3 connection.
 

by Wildflower-nut on Mon Nov 25, 2019 11:23 am
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Just because I take a lot of pictures, doesn't mean they are any good. I know just enough to be dangerous and I'm not sure what I know is correct. I probably don't need the speed but I tend to update only every 10 years. I started with EJ"s machine and dumbed it down for me working with puget sound.

I've used the raid 5 or drobo as it protects against disk failure. You can use a raid 1 which produces a copy on two drives at the same time. If one fails, you still have the second. If the data (file allocation table?) becomes contaminated, it is my understanding, that is carried over to the mirror of a soft error could takeout both drives. Raid 5 protects against hard disk failure and then I make backups of the raid with roll back. This I believe protects against soft errors as you control when copies are made and individual files can be rolled back to a prior version.

My old computer had a raid 0 for my c: drive which has striping between drives for speed but no ability to recover. With ssd, I don't think that is needed anymore.

This is of course overkill.
 

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