![]() (Following monthly rotations, it only took a few minutes for the disk that had been off-site to catch up to the current state of the system, once it was re-attached.) Subsequently I somehow concluded (I don't remember the details now) that it was not a truly bootable 3-disk RAID which could be booted from either of the two rotating external drives if the internal hard drive failed - my original rationale for purchasing and setting up such a system. Raw transfer speed is a little under 3GB/sec, but with ZFS caching I have to do huge transfers (500GB+) before the measured throughput starts to drop below ramdisk speeds.I purchased and installed SoftRAID brand RAID software on my iMac a few years ago, believing it provided me with a truly bootable mirror RAID system encompassing my built-in hard drive (SSD) and two external drives, rotating the external drives monthly so that one was always stored off-site (not being updated) while the other was attached to the system being continuously updated. With 5 gig of ram (of 128 on the i9) dedicated to caching ZFS I get insane benchmark results. I have 4 x 4TB NVME in the OWC TB enclosure as a 16TB partition. ![]() If you want flexibility and performance use ZFS raid. Same limitations as apple raid, don’t waste the $50. So three 4tb drives and a 3tb could only create a raid drive of 3*4=12tb, leaving the other 3tb unallocated. If you use drives of mixed sizes, it can only use the size of the smallest drive times the number of devices. I also have an OWC 4m2 Thunderbolt 3 four bay NVME enclosure with Softraid on a 27” 2019 i9 and can tell you their raid sw doesn’t work any better than apples raid drivers. That much $ for only 4 bays though, I’d leave the drives in a pc and either load a NAS oriented Linux distro or set it up as a hackintosh. Since you don’t have usb3 on those older Mac’s you might want to go with the OWC Thunder Bay that holds 4 drives and connects via Thunderbolt 2. I threw in some old 8TB drives and it makes a reasonably fast ( for spinning disks anyway ) 400MB/sec 40TB drive that only uses 1 usb port. Apple raid will stripe a volume across all 5 devices so there’s no need to buy third party raid sw. I’ve got a 5 drive usb enclosure, works nicely. Thanks for taking your time to get through this long post. Or convert my Windows boxes into some sort of Linux NAS devices? I know nothing about Docker but my experiment with that next year when I have more free time. I know nothing about SoftRaid currently but hope it can support different drive sizes. My "ease of use logic" tells me, keep my current setup, until I buy a Mac Studio or Mac mini and, and buy and connect a 4 bay OWC enclosure with SoftRaid. I do have a copy of my Plex media offsite on 3.5 inch drive. But my Plex media is ONLY stored locally. I like having my files replicated locally and having a copy in Dropbox. My current thinking is install Open Media Server and repurpose the Windows boxes to host this software and personal media and act a Plex Server backup. It's really not a money flow issue, but a current workflow issue. I'd like to either re-purpose the windows boxes to some sort of Linux Raid NAS or just rip the HD's out of them and put 4 of them in a OWC 4 bay SoftRaid device and connect that to my 2012 Mac for now.Įventually, I'm going to get a Mac Studio and Mac Mini as my daily driver. Not ideal of course but I had all this old Windows and Mac hardware so I just basically have 3 redundant copies of all the same files on 3 different boxes. Workflow is files / media on my 2012 iMac copied to 2011 iMac, 2011 iMac copies to Windows box 1 and Windows box 1 copies to Windows box 2. I have a system to copy the changed personal files and media files to the 2nd Windows box that is identical and then I just shut both Windows boxes off. The two old identical Windows 11 boxes with four 2TB drives inside each one.Offsite copy is encrypted with Crytomator and stored in Dropbox. I have an OWC 2 bay external dock hooked up to it via USB 2.0 and it's also my file server for my "local" files. Long story, but I was given this during the pandemic and just brought it back to life to tinker with. 2011 iMac i5, 2TB spinner, 24 GB RAM, running Ventura via OCLP.2012 iMac i7, 2TB SSD, 32 GB RAM, running Ventura via OCLP.Plan: Get rid of my two remaining AMD "Athlon Quad Core" running Windows and only hosting personal files and running Plex Server as a redundant Plex Serverīut do I achieve getting rid of the two Windows boxes by turning them into some sort of Linux NAS devices? Once any of the hardware fails, I will not replace power supply, motherboard, etc. I thought I would ask Mac users what setup they might be using or consider to host their personal files and media, Plex media to be specific before asking in other subs.
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