Which UPS / Which Raid, 6 or 10.

[ucs308]

I am adding an internal raid to a mac pro. ATTO Card. 4 3TB drives. I had planned to build a Raid 6 array with the 4 drives that would give me 6TB of storage. I have read in some places that if I go with a raid 10, I get the same storage but faster writes. I can't find a reasonable qualification of what faster means, other than Raid 6 requires 6 IO operations for each write, where as a raid 10 would require only 2.

Does anybody have any experience of the relative speed differences?

The machine is used for photo editing, retouching and storage of > 200K images. Using Capture One Pro, Adobe CS 6, etc. Backups are to a Synology NAS and clones are done depending on workload for offsite storage.

I am also looking for advice on a reasonable UPS to get for the Mac Pro and further down the road an external 8 or 16 bay drive unit.

Phew.
Thanks.

 

[sk1939]

The differences between RAID 6 and RAID 1+0 can be found here:

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/raid-6-or-raid-1-0-which-should-you-choose/2689

A reasonable UPS would be an APC SmartUPS 1500VA unit if you have the circuit capacity (20A) to handle it. Otherwise you could go with a 1000VA unit.

 

[ucs308]

Thanks for the link.

I had read that posting but it was not really clear on the specifics. With that in mind maybe I will build both a raid 10 and a raid 6 and test. If I do that do you have suggestions on a tool to use to get good sense of the speed difference? I have been using Blackmagic from the App store so far.

Thanks for the UPS recommendation. I will take a look.

 

[sk1939]

Basically, RAID 1+0 gives you better write performance, faster rebuild speed, and the performance degradation during rebuild process is minimal. However, RAID 6 can withstand the loss of two disks, which RAID 1+0 can also do, but only if your cards are right.

Try HD Tune Pro.