Drive brands

I am currently using:

• iMac Pro which has 10GBit Ethernet connector
• CAT 6 LAN 1GBit
• Synology DS1815+ NAS 80% full
• Promise Pagsus3 R6 80% full via TB3

As well as trying to reduce my file usage, I am contemplating how best to increase my video editing storage. Here are my option that I am aware of:

1. Add a Samsung T7 4TB USB-C drive for "current" projects and move all archives off that once editing is finished
   PROS: Cheapest and simplest
   CONS: Need to juggle projects
2. Replace the 6x 4TB drives in the Pegasus with 6x 10TB drives
   PROS: Mid price; TB3 speed
   CONS: No new functionality
3. Replace the Synology NAS with a new Synology that connects via 10GBit Ethernet and has M.2 SSD caching and 10TB drives
   PROS: Expandable "smart" RAID, new features with DSM7.x
   CONS: Dearest option, not sure how to set up SAN and NAS is not natively usable by FCP

I would value your comments and suggestions.

If you don't require on-site collaborative multi-user access to the NAS, I'd suggest upgrading the Pegasus R6. When co-located my team uses a several 10 gig QNAP NAS units and they mostly work OK, but we have a storage engineer to maintain them. When we are working separately we use local Thunderbolt storage. 

A NAS can work well but there are possible issues with Spotlight indexing, searching Finder tags, optimizing network performance for the unique FCP I/O profile, etc.

With a Lumaforge server, all that engineering and support is done for you. They are expensive but I don't recollect seeing any posts here by Lumaforge customers begging for help. However we periodically see people with other NAS brands struggling with performance, optimization, MacOS and FCP behavior, etc. 

If you are a technical person with network and system-layer experience, it can work. If you are comfortable editing config files, there are ways to optimize NAS performance for FCP as posted here. However such low-level steps are not guaranteed to keep working on future MacOS versions:  #109131

But if you just want an expanded storage solution which doesn't require NAS support expertise, locally-attached Thunderbolt arrays work well.

I agree with Joema, upgrade the R6. If you're not collaborating over the LAN with others, keep it local, keep it simple, keep it safe. Plus, what are you backing up the R6 to at night?

Thanks for the great advice. Much appreciated. I’ve got feedback from Promise to confirm that I can swap disk sets between a Promise3 and Promise32, which means I can buy a set of IronWolf HDDs, then buy a new Promise32 from Apple, then put my current Promise HDDS in the Promise32 and the new ones in mine. Once the new HDDs are set up, I can copy the existing files. I need to complete the exercise in under 14 days so I can return the new Promis32 to Apple. This should be doable. I’ll need to just confirm that the 14 day return policy from Apple applies to the Promise32.

I was leaning towards Seagate IronWolf drives, but looking at the BackBlaze statistics, Toshiba HGST seem more reliable. With limited funds, I am considering the 10TB drives.

Would you agree that HGST is worth the extra cost over IronWolf?

pszilard wrote: I was leaning towards Seagate IronWolf drives, but looking at the BackBlaze statistics, Toshiba HGST seem more reliable. With limited funds, I am considering the 10TB drives.

Would you agree that HGST is worth the extra cost over IronWolf?

HGST-branded drives are no longer manufactured.  The company was merged with Western Digital in 2012, and as of late 2018, all new drives will be solely branded Western Digital or WD.

Any HGST-branded drives must be older ones before that change happened. There are possibly some still in warehouses and the distribution channel.

Every HDD and every manufacturing batch has different reliability numbers. The Backblaze Q3 2020 stats don't have comparative data for 10TB drives, the closest size is 12TB. You can download the raw data which is in CSV format for extensive analysis:  www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-dat...hard-drive-test-data

In general I wouldn't worry that much about perceived reliability of Brand A vs Brand B. In either case you must assume drives will fail. Even if using higher RAID formats, the entire chassis can fail, the file system itself can fail, fire or theft is possible, or user error can damage data. My team had a NAS server stolen from a securely parked vehicle. Fortunately we had a redundant backup server.