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I have a 64TB G-tech g studio ev tower setup in RAID 10.
I have 2 iMacs I'd like to be able to read the data held on it (video rushes) at high enough speed so as not to slow down editing. They also need to write to it.
The RAID has 2 thunderbolt slots. So do the iMacs as well as an ethernet cable and we have very fast WiFi.
We don't have a dedicated server and I'd rather not go down that route without exhausting other options.
Any thoughts on the best way to link them up?
At the moment I'm trying to set up the RAID via thunderbolt to one of the iMacs, then somehow share it as a folder for access to the other (just plugging thunderbolt cables into both machines from the same RAID tower only connects to the one that was plugged in first) - though without much success.
Can I create some kind of partition on the RAID and install some NAS software on it? Can I do that without formatting the RAID and losing everything on it?
Sincerely,
Not a Network Expert
mac thread >>>>
CYOA-
Thunderbolt networking is cool, but only between 2 computers. You can daisy chain many drives and monitors, but not many computers... it starts to be an addressing nightmare so it limits what is available.
Wired ethernet is still the way to go here, and I'm not sure what the networking cards are on the iMacs, if gigabit then just make sure your cables are Cat6 and your switch is gigabit and you should be good.
Another way to go would be to mix the above... Thunderbolt to the first computer, ethernet from that computer to the next.
You're not going to be limited on gigabit ethernet, the limitations here are on the performance characteristics of the RAID, and the drives that are in the iMacs. However WiFi and 100Mbps ethernet is likely below the performance of a RAID10 setup and SSDs in the iMacs, hence gigabit ethernet or Thunderbolt is preferred.
Velocio
I run a Plex server.
And I run a NAS.
I would definitely recommend making this distinct things, and not the same box.
The NAS should do nothing other than manage a number of drives, ensure that there is enough parity (data duplicated in case a disk fails), and keep the data on the drives available to the network.
From a NAS with a small number of drives (4 or fewer) look for hardware RAID5. This allows for 1 disk to fail in it's entirety and your data is still going to be OK. It's also very fast for reading data, which is good for media. Of course, if a drive can fail and you still have data this means that you don't get full capacity... if you put 4 x 3TB drives in there for 12TB total, only 3 x 3TB are actually usable... so you'll have 9TB of space.
If you go for a NAS with more than 4 disks, then start looking at RAID6. This allows for 2 drives to fail without causing data loss. It gets expensive at this point.
Off the shelf NAS is decent enough, QNAP do some nice gear. It is possible to beat the price by about a 3rd... not off the disks, but of the enclosure and software. Look at FreeNAS and google some guides. In real terms it means you can save £100 or so, but will invest a lot of time and energy to do so.
As for the Plex media server. There are things it needs, and things it doesn't need. It does need a good CPU as it will be encoding quite a bit so that media suits various screen sizes or bandwidth requirements. It will need a few GB of RAM as it runs a database... but if you have a NAS then the whole of the Plex server can just be run on a single small SSD with Windows, in a small media PC.
Spec CPU high, spec RAM medium, spec disk low.