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Migrating from TB4 to TB8

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(@adam_raid)
Posts: 2
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Hello,

I have a couple of questions regarding a planned upgrade from a Thunderbay 4 to Thunderbay 8. My current setup is a TB4 (Thunderbolt 2 version connected to Thunderbolt 3 imac with apple adapter) with 4 2TB Toshiba Enterprise drives in a raid5 config for 6TB usable space. I use this primarily for video editing and it's met my needs well. I should mention that I back this up daily to an external USB drive. I've ordered a TB8 enclosure and (5) 14TB Exos drives. My plan is to certify and build a new raid5 with 4 of the drives and maintain the 5th as a cold spare.

Question 1 - Which raid level will best meet my needs for video editing and some fault tolerance if usable space isn't extremely important to me but performance is (raid 5 or raid 1+0)?

Question 2 - Is there a significant difference in performance between a 4 drive and 5 drive raid 5 config in the TB8 in softraid? Trying to decide if it's worthwhile to raid the 5 drives I have and buy a 6th cold spare. I intend to populate the other bays with a single backup drive for my imac and maybe a raid 0 stripe of 2 or 3 ssds for more bandwidth intensive editing projects should the need arise.

Question 3 - I'm currently on Mojave and have a softraid5 xt license on my computer. I was told this should continue to work with the new TB8 enclosure I purchased but that I would need to do the paid upgrade to V6 if I update my OS at a later date. Once I build my new raid volume on the TB8, I plan to copy my data over from the TB4 to the TB8 (about 5.5 TB). What's the safest / most efficient way to do this after I've backed up to my USB drive? Should I connect both raids to separate TB3 ports on my imac and use software like CCC (which I own) to copy the data over or would I be better off moving the 4 existing raid5 drives from the TB4 to the TB8 and migrating the data from the old raid 5 to the new raid5 within the same 8 bay chassis?

Question 4 - Once I'm built out and migrated to my new raid set, what are the best practices for maintenance for my newly created raid set? I don't currently own a copy of diskwarrior but should I be running this (or different software) on a regular interval to maintain the integrity of the volume? If I should be using diskwarrior, should I run this on my old volume and or newly created raid volume in advance of migrating the data?

Sorry for the long-winded questions here, just want to make sure I'm moving forward in the safest / smartest way possible as I really rely on this data and uptime and performance are extremely important.

 

-Adam   

 

 
Posted : 07/06/2022 12:28 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8006
Member Admin
 

First Licensing. If you buy a TB8, you generally receive a SoftRAID license for SoftRAID 6, so you don't have to worry about the license. One license manages unlimited devices on your computer.

Both RAID 5 and 10 will meet your needs, RAID 5 is somewhat faster. A 5 drive RAID 5 is probably 150MB/s faster overall, as performance scales to a degree when you add disks to a volume.

It doesn't matter how you migrate the data, CCC does a great job. You can move it enclosure to enclosure for sure.

Note: Disk Warrior only works on HFS and Big Sur or older. I do recommend it as a monthly maintenance on your volumes, it can prevent directory corruption and keep performance excellent. But you do have the macOS limitation, until Alsoft can make it work on Monterey. I dont know of another effective way to keep volume directories optimal.

 
Posted : 07/06/2022 2:21 pm
(@adam_raid)
Posts: 2
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Topic starter
 

@softraid-support

I forgot to mention that I've purchased an open box / used TB8 (from OWC) which explicitly does not come with softraid so I'll need to rely on my existing softraid 5 xt license that came with my TB4. This should still work though right, provided I stay on Mojave? I don't need an additional license of softraid xt to run an additional thunderbay enclosure on the same computer right? I'm not attempting to build a raid across 2 different enclosures or anything like that. If I copy the data from the old chassis to the new, is there any particular order I should connect them? ie should they both be on their own TB3 port or can I daisy chain the TB4 chassis off of the TB8 chassis via the Apple adapter? I need 1 of the TB3 ports on my system to connect to an I/O box and on to my broadcast monitor while certification / raid build is happening.

 
Posted : 07/06/2022 8:28 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8006
Member Admin
 

@adam_raid 

If you stay on Mojave, yes you can keep using 5.8.4. There is no particular configuration required, no.

 
Posted : 07/06/2022 10:51 pm
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