Promise RAID... INSIDE the new Mac Pro...

This is really interesting...
www.promise.com/us/Products/Pegasus/R4i-J2i

Meh. I bought the J2I, but only because I wanted the rack and the cable for power/data. I'm not keen on being forced to also pay for a useless 8TB spinner that I'll never use. Instead, I put 2 2TB SSDs in, and striped them into a 4TB volume.

Definitely would have preferred an empty unit.

How is the 8TB HHD useless? I have a Promise external RAID (Thunderbolt) full of spinning disc drives, I edit H.264 4K multicams with no issues.

FCPX.guru wrote: How is the 8TB HHD useless? I have a Promise external RAID (Thunderbolt) full of spinning disc drives, I edit H.264 4K multicams with no issues.

Noisy
Slow
Noisy

Did I mention: slow?

If they work for you, cool. I think we're at an age where spinners aren't really a thing for workstations/desktops any longer. SSDs and NVMes are pretty big and silly fast in a lot of cases. Spinners belong in file servers.

I stick by my initial post in that I wish they'd sell a drive-less unit. But they won't because they like to have an excuse to vastly mark up their products way up.

Slow? 4K multicams in a RAID is not slow. And it's quiet. I do voice-overs while only 4 feet from it and it's dead quiet.k SSDs are still very expensive and don't come as large as HDDs do. HDDs have plenty of use and in a RAID are plenty fast and quiet enough. I have a whole TV station proving that. We've used Promise RAIDs for years and have loved the performance. But, you have your opinion, and that's valid.

FCPX.guru wrote: Slow? 4K multicams in a RAID is not slow. And it's quiet. I do voice-overs while only 4 feet from it and it's dead quiet.

It's not dead quiet; you just may not be able to hear them. I can hear any spinner in the same room with me no matter how far it is from me. There's just simply no way to make them quiet. And they are slow, in comparison to the 10GB/sec reads, 9GB/sec writes (read that carefully ) that I'm getting from NVMe hardware RAID. You'll never get that from your spinners.

We just have a different perspective of what's considered quiet, and what's considered fast. If spinners work for you, cool. I think Promise would go a long way by offering empty units of their products so people aren't forced to pay for drives they may not want.

So you're saying I'm stupid and don't know what I'm talking about, or are you calling me a liar? Either way, sure, you're opinion is valid, mine isn't. This entire TV station full of RAIDs it by no means any sort of real-world experience.

FCPX.guru wrote: This is really interesting...
www.promise.com/us/Products/Pegasus/R4i-J2i

Would I want that crazy contraption in my PC? No! Apple should have left room in the 2019 Mac Pro for hard drives without the need for propitiatory hardware. It defeats the purpose of using inexpensive mechanical hard drives. With only 4 drives it might not playback more than on layer of 8K 60P at 3:1 compression. They could make an 8 drive version but then you would not have any empty PCIE slots.