Quiet Thunderbolt array storage?

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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superlongcat
Posts: 14
Joined: Fri Feb 07, 2014 5:06 am

Quiet Thunderbolt array storage?

Post by superlongcat » Mon Feb 10, 2014 4:33 pm

You know, I get that they're designed for soccer moms and self-absorbed Pretentious Single Designer, but some of us do actually push OS X's envelopes a little and the hardware config of the Apple machines is getting increasingly irritating. For *any* kind of useful storage now we've got to invest in a separate and usually pretty clattery box.

It's pretty much inevitable I'll be replacing the unreliable iMacs with the new Pros after a hackintoshing experiment with HP workstations didn't go as well as I'd planned, and especially for when I'm working in my office at night (in the middle of nowhere in a quiet industrial park, and I'm more of a night person productivity-wise) and main home (in the boondocks, deathly quiet) the existing Pegasus Thunderbolt array storage just really gets on my nerves. The iMacs themselves are quiet (when you let them cook themselves to instability that is) of course and the new Pro can't be far behind, but the drives just makes it a way more noisy combination than a deskside PC workstation with the same internal storage and many times the power. I'd like to mitigate that somewhat with the new pairing.

I don't need silent - though that would be nice of course, but as quiet as possible. Some might say 'stick it in a cabinet' but I do occasionally swap drive sets, and I also have desk configs that make it hard to have anything other than a roughly PC-shaped box under the desk so it'd be inconvenient. I don't mind DIY building if it's not too involved... in fact, if it can act like a deskside pedestal for the Pro (ironic, eh) that would be a good thing.

Does anyone have any recommendations? 4 drives minimum, nothing ridiculous maximum. SATA/SAS I'm not hugely concerned as long as throughput is at least in the 500MB/sec-or-pretty-near class in RAID5.

boost
Posts: 661
Joined: Wed Jul 12, 2006 10:29 am
Location: de_DE

Re: Quiet Thunderbolt array storage?

Post by boost » Tue Feb 11, 2014 3:59 am

No.
superlongcat wrote:Does anyone have any recommendations? 4 drives minimum, nothing ridiculous maximum. SATA/SAS I'm not hugely concerned as long as throughput is at least in the 500MB/sec-or-pretty-near class in RAID5.
How?
A single drive averages 100MB/s (@ 5X00 RPM)- 140MB/s (@ 7200 RPM). In Raid5 with 4 drives you get (3x100MB/s) 300MB/s - (3x140MB/s) 420MB/s before controller overhead, thunderbolt overhead, etc.
2 possible solutions:
1 TB Easy: Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt Portable SSD read speed up to 350MB/s great random reads compared to HDD, write speeds about half of read speeds. Maximum capacity is 1TB.
Multiple TB Complicated: Sonnet Echo Express SE II external PCIe anclosure with a Raid controller with external ports external enclosure with compatible ports. Same speed as internal solution, but comes in two parts. With Four drives in Raid5 you can't exceed the speeds listed above, with more drives higher speeds are possible.

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