Best thunderbolt DAS ?

Combat squirrel

Combat squirrel

Combat squirrel

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As title, looking for a way to have say 4-6 bay hard drive enclosure on thunderbolt for speed - ideally 2-4 SSD's to keep speeds up then say 4 HDD for storage capacity - similar to a NAS but way way faster and directly linked to my computer as long term huge file storage thats still fast enough to work from if needed.

I already have a good NAS but its not fast enough and I have no interest in upgrading my entire home wide network to 10gb speeds as it would cost more than just a DAS - ideally a DAS as my main 'large pool' - then overnight it can sync across to my NAS.

Kind of like a Drobo I guess with SSD's for high speed cache, but not Drobo as thats proprietary nonsense that lost all my data when the unit died.
 
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I think you may have to settle for two devices. I can find a USB4 SSD DAS - the Terramaster D4 - but the hybrid and HDD DAS are all USB3.2 at best. I may have missed something on a quick scan but that was my general impression.
 
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Combat squirrel said:
As title, looking for a way to have say 4-6 bay hard drive enclosure on thunderbolt for speed - ideally 2-4 SSD's to keep speeds up then say 4 HDD for storage capacity - similar to a NAS but way way faster and directly linked to my computer as long term huge file storage thats still fast enough to work from if needed.

I already have a good NAS but its not fast enough and I have no interest in upgrading my entire home wide network to 10gb speeds as it would cost more than just a DAS - ideally a DAS as my main 'large pool' - then overnight it can sync across to my NAS.

Kind of like a Drobo I guess with SSD's for high speed cache, but not Drobo as thats proprietary nonsense that lost all my data when the unit died.
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I can't find anything that does both SSDs and regular HDD storage, even with professional DAS solutions, such as the Sandisk Professional G-RAID Shuttle 4 - 24TB.

What you might consider is a custom NAS with a 10gig LAN connection and a form of DAS to your current machine via a 10gig LAN card.

You would need an OS that can function as a DAS so that you can just connect directly via Ethernet instead of via a switch but AFAIK, that OS exists I just can't find it.
 
I think you will need to go ssd only. Forget HDD in a DAS. they are too slow. nvme for hot / live storage/ SSD for secondary and HDD for archive/slow. How much DAS space do you need ? This will largely govern the cost.

Start looking at OWC try OWCUS4EXP4M2

or the terramaster D4 mentioned above. HDD's are so slow these days as to be used strictly only for archive and slow retrieval like a plex store for example. even a fast raid setup will still have seek and start times magnitudes slower than ssd.
 
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whitecrook said:
I think you will need to go ssd only. Forget HDD in a DAS. they are too slow. nvme for hot / live storage/ SSD for secondary and HDD for archive/slow. How much DAS space do you need ? This will largely govern the cost.

Start looking at OWC try OWCUS4EXP4M2

try something like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/OWC-Enclosure-SoftRAID-Compatible-Aluminium/dp/B0FFJKGCFP
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No linking to competitors as per forum rules.

Edit: But I still agree with your point that HDD in a DAS would be too slow. Dump to SSD storage and then the system offloads the data over time onto HDD storage for luke warm access makes more sense.
 
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Thanks guys you maybe right.

Now im thinking for my workflow:

[Main Mac Workstation] ---> 4TB NVME Work drive (Current project) --> OWC 4 drive SSD DAS (Past years projects) --> NAS which I already have (but slow, 100mb/s transfer speeds) ----> Backblaze

I could clone my 4TB to the local DAS for overnight back up and then get that to overnight backup to the NAS

I'm currently missing the DAS drive and have had to go direct to NAS which has been a pain as you can imagine, hence why I want at least enough for past years data (Normally 10-14tb a year)

My final question is - while the OWC is m.2 NVME (which is amazing)

Are there any regular SATA SSD? - to be honest that would be plenty of speed locally for data dumping at 500mb/s (or more), that attached via thunderbolt or usb4 would be ok?
 
Combat squirrel said:
My final question is - while the OWC is m.2 NVME (which is amazing)

Are there any regular SATA SSD? - to be honest that would be plenty of speed locally for data dumping at 500mb/s (or more), that attached via thunderbolt or usb4 would be ok?
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Very few these days. The WD Red SA500 is still available but silly money and the Samsung 870 EVO is still going. Anything else is QLC and I wouldn't trust my data to them.
 
Combat squirrel said:
Thanks guys you maybe right.

Now im thinking for my workflow:

[Main Mac Workstation] ---> 4TB NVME Work drive (Current project) --> OWC 4 drive SSD DAS (Past years projects) --> NAS which I already have (but slow, 100mb/s transfer speeds) ----> Backblaze

I could clone my 4TB to the local DAS for overnight back up and then get that to overnight backup to the NAS
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This all looks like a headache with a single drive failure resulting in a ton of lost data.

Just use a proper NAS with a good RAID config and then offsite backups.

Mac -> 10gig LAN cable direct connection -> NAS -> backblaze.
 
JollyJamma said:
This all looks like a headache with a single drive failure resulting in a ton of lost data.

Just use a proper NAS with a good RAID config and then offsite backups.

Mac -> 10gig LAN cable direct connection -> NAS -> backblaze.
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Not really, the datas copied multiple more times - I really dont want to invest in 10 gig Lan setup as my network is vast and I really dont have the money right now !

Much faster and easier to make a local data dump area, then off load over night.

I could do the NVME drive to the DAS every 30 minutes which is more than enough for me as I dont work that fast - just setup the DAS as a raid 5 so it can tolerate a drive fail.
 
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