External HardDrive Mac Pro

[Tariq Peter]

Hi,


I have the MacPro4,1 and looking to create a good workflow for wedding filming and my main concern is storage space. I have 3 internal bays currently occupied by

1 x 640GB (which contains the OS)
2 x 500GB Raid 0 which contains current weddings I have shot and a lot of family videos

I am now planning to buy a 2TB drive for the 4th bay and copy all my data from the 2x500GB data over to it. I will then remove the 2x500GB to add larger drives.

My main concern is 1 loss of data and 2 storage. How would you suggest I use the 2 empty Bays once I remove the 2x500GB drives and also moving forward as my business increases?

I was initially looking at Sonnet - Tempo SATA 6Gb/s PCIe 2.0: 2-Port 6Gb/s eSATA PCI Express 2.0 Card which I could then use with a 4 Bay external enclosure but then was told to purchase a Sonnet - Tempo E2P: 2-Port Serial ATA PCI Express Card; Compatible in Computers With PCI Express Slots as the Mac Pro does not each 3Gb/s (300MB/s)


Any advice would be great.

[Nigel Barker]

We use a couple of Synology DS1511+ Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. Each has five disks configured as RAID-5. The performance I see over Gigabit Ethernet is similar to the internal disks on the Mac Pros (80-100MB/s R/W). Each DS1511+ has a 5-disk bay & you can add two 5-disk expander units so in theory with today's 3TB disks you can have 45TB or around 36TB with it configured as three RAID-5 volumes. You could theoretically get better performance with a 4-5 disk external enclosure & a SATA RAID card but unless you are editing uncompressed video the performance of a good NAS device is perfectly adequate.