Which external hard drive for producing on two iMacs?

Hey.

A colleague and I have used his iMac with Final Cut Pro for a while, which also meant that all the files were located on his hard drive. However, it is way too risky, since there is no backup. Therefore, we would like to purchase an external hard drive, with a minimum of 4 TB. to be operated in RAID1.

Furthermore, we predict that I'm also going to be installing Final Cut Pro on my device, so the NAS needs to be able to have two iMacs connected at the same time (through USB/FireWire, not network) - however not necessarily having libraries opened simultaneously.

Which drive would you recommend for this job and why?

Thanks for your help

Best regards,
ShortyDK

Since no one has responded I'll give my 2 cents. There are a bunch of options out there that will fit your needs. I did a quick Google search and found many options as well as many review sites about NAS systems like you're describing. Not using gigabit connections cuts some of them out and needing 2 USB3 ports cuts out a couple more.

The one that I would be wary about is the Lacie Big raid drive NAS. Some friends of mine had 2 of them and they were very wonky. One ended up failing because it was taking 10 minutes to boot up so one of them restarted it... crash.

As long as the speed and size are right then basically go for the best one you can afford that has the connectivity you need.

Good luck.

ShortyDK wrote: … so the NAS needs to be able to have two iMacs connected at the same time (through USB/FireWire, not network) …

you can not connect one drive simultaneously to two computers by usb/fw …
hint: NAS=Network Attached Storage

You need a shared storage like a LumaForge Jellyfish or a Smalltree Titanium Z5.

I actually don’t a bit of research into this for myself lately.

Excluding SSD, which is quite excessive in cost when it comes to a large amount of storage, I did find the WD Black with either 4 or 6 TB of storage and 256GB cache to be amount the fastest HDD that I could find.

There is an earlier version of the 4TB drive with 128GB cache, I’m not referring to that version, although it would still be pretty good. The newer version clocks at around 210+MBps for both read and write it I recall correctly. Which would roughly double in a striped setup.

If you RAiD a few or this up in an enclosure that supports USB 3.1 with UASP, TB2 or TB3/USB-C you should get the performance you need.

You still need a shared storage. Can’t just use a RAID with two macs at the same time.

What if you hang the RAID off a network router??

The way to do this with a NAS system is clearly to use the ethernet ports on the iMacs but the OP said he doesn't want to use those gigabit ethernet ports. I'm not sure of any other way to accomplish this.

Why not use the Ethernet ports?

The reason I am so reluctant to use the Ethernet ports is because I work at a municipality with a very complex network system, and we've tried both SMB and NFS as well as a few others to get Final Cut Pro to load libraries from a network drive - nothing has worked.

Therefore, my reasoning is that if we use USB or FireWire, we completely avoid this network dilemma, making everything a whole lot easier.

I guess we don't strictly need both of the computers to be connected to the NAS server, since we only work with video editing from time to time... I guess we can just plug it in, when we need to...

We've tried every possible combination with our network, but nothing worked - that's why I would really like to avoid connecting it to the network.

ShortyDK wrote: The reason I am so reluctant to use the Ethernet ports is because I work at a municipality with a very complex network system, and we've tried both SMB and NFS as well as a few others to get Final Cut Pro to load libraries from a network drive - nothing has worked.

You should try putting the libraries on the local hard drive, but put all your media and caches, etc., on the shared storage in a project folder. That way, do you don't have to run the libraries off the shared storage. However, FCPX now has support for this over SMB and NFS. But SMB support requires some specific configuration on the server side for this to work. If you don't have this, you can still use it as shared storage and run lean local libraries (this is a very common way to do it).

Bob Zelin can answer any question you have about shared storage. I hired him to install our shared storage and he offered a fantastic service. We needed the same set up, 2 iMacs with shared storage. There's a great FAQ on his website at www.bobzelin.com . You can start there.