[Ted L. Nancy]

I currently have two 4726 enclosures connected to my Mac Pro via what I think is a 3124. I like the fact that the enclosures don't use tays. Other than that, they've been an unreliable pain. For months now, Silicon Image has failed to update their drivers for Snow Leopard, so I am running a dysfunctional BASE driver that only reads 8 out of my 10 drives, if that. Very lame. Very annoying.

The drives are storage only (pictures and some family home videos), mostly for my wife's small photography business. (That is to say, once a drive is filled up, I do not add or delete an data from it- only read.) I keep all the drives I use in the enclosures and they each have mirrored backups, which I store in my firesafe in the basement.

If I wanted a new setup, where should I turn? I keep thinking drobo just to make things simpler, but I've heard it can be problematic. I'm really looking for something that will have supported drivers now and in the future. No trays are a plus.

[besson3c]

Are you looking for a RAID array? If so, turn key? Something w/o its own built in proprietary built-in stuff (ala Drobo) that you would manage with a RAID card? Are you looking for a standalone storage appliance, or something that would be tethered to your Mac?

[Ted L. Nancy]

RAID is fine, although not needed. (Currently, I'm running JBOD in my RAID boxes.)

Not sure what you mean by "turn key."

I do not think I need a "standalone appliance," as it would always be connected to my Mac Pro.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Ted L. Nancy 

RAID is fine, although not needed. (Currently, I'm running JBOD in my RAID boxes.)

Not sure what you mean by "turn key."

I do not think I need a "standalone appliance," as it would always be connected to my Mac Pro.

Several RAID configurations would give you more operations per seconds (IOPS), if that is of use to you. It would also give you a safety net in the event of HD failure.

What happens when you retire your Mac Pro? Are you going to want to transfer your disks from your old machine to your new one, leaving your Mac without any disks at all? A standalone storage appliance gives you the flexibility to not have your storage tethered to your Mac, and it also allows other computers you may have to share and access the same storage.

I'm a fan of not using direct attach storage for when your needs grow to this extent.

[Ted L. Nancy]

I have two disks inside my computer: startup and time machine. Then I part from this machine, those disks will stay with the computer.

The external discs and everything stored on them will stay with me.

[mduell]

There's no reason for the expense and performance penalty of Drobo/NAS. The eSATA PM setup works for you, it's just a driver issue.

Grab an eSATA card from a vendor that cares about Mac support rather than using the freebie that came with the enclosures. HighPoint RocketRAID 2314 ($190) and Sonnet Tempo E4P ($260) both advertise SL support (HighPoint's are actually on the SL install disk, but I think their website has an updated package).

[Ted L. Nancy]

mduell,

I see what you mean. Since the 4726 is a hardware RAId, it doesn't really use a driver. The eSATA card is the issue. I definitely consider this to be good news since it means I don't need to shuffle around my drives into new enclosures.

I'll keep the HighPoint on my "to buy" list for the upcoming months. Do they do pretty well keeping their driver's updating for new versions of OSX??

[mduell]

The extent of their driver support is quite good, but it's hard to judge over time since obviously they didn't update their PCI-X card drivers (for G5s) for SL.

[Ted L. Nancy]

Got my HighPoint 2314 from Amazon. (In this case, compared with Newegg, Amazon was a few bucks cheaper, had free shipping, and has an easier and cheaper returns policy IMO.) Installed and works great right out of the box. Thanks again.

[Ted L. Nancy]

Well I spoke to soon. It only works so long as I do not put a drive in the 5th (bottom) bay of my 4726 enclosures. With a drive installed there it won't recognise any of the drives. Now what should I do?

[mduell]

Call Highpoint.

In the time since my last post I've discovered the Highpoint won't do what I want in FreeBSD and I'm back to a 3ware.

[Ted L. Nancy]

Ok... nevermind... I got it working. (The problem was only with one box, actually. I had to open that box, switch the wire for bay 4 with bay 5, turn on box and computer, recognised drives, then I shut everything down, switched the wires back, now it's working. Weird.)

With this new setup, the drives don't seem to be hot-swappable. Oh well.

Anywho..

My 4726s are currently setup as JBOD, which is great. If for whatever reason in the future I wanted to change the configuration, would I need to use my old Silicon Image 3124 card? I opened the 4726 management utility and it doesn't see the drives.