2TB SSD for RAID 5 Enclosure

Orrelljet on 12/04/2023 - 16:20
Last edited 12/04/2023 - 16:22

After purchasing and upgrading the Dell Optiplex 7060 micro a few of us bought from a recent deal, I moved it to home server duties and purchased a 4-bay OWC RAID 5 usb-c enclosure for it. I had previously been using a 4-bay OWC Thunderbolt 3 enclosure with my Mac mini but the spinning drives were pretty loud so it wasn't working in my office. The 4TB HDDs were moved to the new enclosure.

Long story short, the empty OWC Thunderbay I was going to sell on will be used by my wife for photo storage so I'm looking for 2TB SATA SSDs I could use with it. I could go the WD RED route, for cheaper/more storage, but speed and silence are more important to my better half. The enclosure will be connected to a mac-compatible Lenovo thunderbolt 3 dock I used to use for work and a MacBook Air M2.

My shortlist so far:

Team Vulcan Z - This is a TLC drive which has good reviews and seems like a reasonable value proposition - https://www.pccasegear.com/products/59031/team-vulcan-z-2-5i…

Silicon Power Ace A55 - According to Amazon this should be TLC - https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07Q37V1C9?th=1

Patriot P210 2TB - Likely QLC but no real confirmation - https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B087K9L7S7?th=1

I was originally looking at the Patriot Burst Elite, as I bought a couple from a previous deal and they seem to work OK, but the P210 outperforms them for the same money, pretty much.

Any comments or other suggestions? I know the MX500 used to be the go to drive but recent revisions may be less reliable/speedy and may not offer the value they once did. Samsung would definitely be another option but when you need 4 the $80+ difference in cost, per drive, soon adds up. Based on the review I read - https://www.techpowerup.com/review/team-group-t-force-vulcan… - the Vulcan Z is faster more of the time compared to the 870 QVO and BX500 too.

Another option…sell the empty enclosure and purchase one designed for NVME drives, like this one https://www.macfixit.com.au/products/owc-express-4m2-4-slot-…, and purchase 4 of them instead. More speed certainly and similar cost, assuming I can sell the TB3 enclosure I have for a reasonable price.

Computing 2TB Computer Component SSD

Comments

  • Zephyrus on 12/04/2023 - 16:54
    +1

    How many photos do you expect to transfer in one go? I wouldn't expect much of a speed issue with any of those with just photo storage.

    • Orrelljet on 12/04/2023 - 19:02

      The initial transfer will be somewhere around 1.5TB but after that it will be a few hundred MB at a time. The Vulcan Z 2TB has 660GB of SLC cache so should never slow down after that first copy across. Even with RAID 5 she should see somewhere in the region of 1200-1500MB/s (max).

  • freefall101 on 12/04/2023 - 17:41
    +1

    Is 8TB really necessary (6TB useable space with RAID5)? It wouldn't be hard to just throw a single 4TB drive in a TB4 enclosure and back it up, that would be faster, better security and a lot cheaper.

    • Orrelljet on 12/04/2023 - 18:55

      Formatted she’d be looking at somewhere between 5.5TB to 6TB, yes, so plenty of headroom for the future. I did consider a single 4TB drive and have another TB3 enclosure which would work well for that purpose. I’ve not ruled it out yet but am leaning towards the RAID 5 option, as it provides her with zero downtime (of sorts). If I went the single nvme/enclosure route and had an issue with the drive inside it would take me a while to get her back up and running (trolling OzB waiting for the right drive at the right price etc).

      As I said, I’ve not ruled it out but I prefer the (sense of) security RAID 5 brings.

      • freefall101 on 12/04/2023 - 19:44
        +1

        Fair enough, also makes sense to just go with what you have rather than selling/buying stuff.

        There's also the teamgroup CX2 to consider, expensive at Amazon but cheaper elsewhere - https://au.pcpartpicker.com/product/mc848d/team-cx2-2-tb-25-…

      • Chandler on 12/04/2023 - 23:37
        +1

        Was going to talk about RAID not being a backup but seems you're not looking at it that way, thankfully :)

        Just bear in mind what RAID 5 does to your data: it is striped (split) across N - P disks (N being the total number of disks, P being the number of parity disks, likely 1 in your scenario, so striped across 3 disks). Any disk in the array is unreadable outside of the context of the array (since the data is split). To read any file, all disks in the array are read from (and likewise for writing). And in a hardware RAID situation, if you get a hardware failure you've got a high(er) likelihood of data loss.

  • getho on 12/04/2023 - 18:44
    +1

    What flavour USBC is it? 5gbps, 10,20,40?

    I'd get the cheapest tlc you can get your hands on. I've been using raid 5 for my storage for years. I think it's a great security/speed compromise. 4 drives will max out your enclosure I think

    • Orrelljet on 12/04/2023 - 18:48

      It’s thunderbolt 3 so 40Gbps theoretical maximum. Nvme would definitely provide more speed but even SATA SSDs would be decent.

      I’m the same with RAID 5. Might be due to working with server storage enclosures but it’s served me well for many years too. No substitute for a good backup (or 3) but decent.

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