Christiaan Posted May 3, 2013 Share Posted May 3, 2013 We're looking at getting a Pegasus R4 + Mac Mini Server. Is anyone using this setup? What RAID level do you recommend? What RAID level do you recommend if we want to use Time Machine as well? Quote Link to comment
Christiaan Posted October 20, 2014 Author Share Posted October 20, 2014 Just bumping this one. Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted October 20, 2014 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted October 20, 2014 RAID 1 or RAID 5 for safety. RAID 0 is just for speed and is often better to replace with an SSD these days. Time Machine should work just fine with at least a RAID 1, I've seen this done regularly. I am willing to bet it doesn't care about the physical or logical configuration of the drives, it just needs a target volume with the HFS file system. Quote Link to comment
Christiaan Posted October 20, 2014 Author Share Posted October 20, 2014 Thanks Jim. I was wondering about not running as a RAID and instead having 1 drive for active projects/data backed up to a 2nd drive with Time Machine. Then a 3rd drive for archived projects, cloned periodically to a 4th drive. + an offsite backup of 1 and 3 over the net. Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted October 20, 2014 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted October 20, 2014 The main reason to use RAID 1 or 5 is the fear of hardware failure on the drives themselves. however even just having one Time Machine drive backing you up will protect you from that, since if either your main drive or the Time Machine volume dies, you already have the other to replace it and then you'd be replacing the dead drive immediately anyway. The setup you describe that does not use a RAID would work just fine for removing the risk of hardware failure, with the added bonus if the nice Time Machine features that let you go back through multiple iterations/versions of files, something that a regular RAID setup doesn't offer on its own. 1 Quote Link to comment
Diamond Posted October 27, 2014 Share Posted October 27, 2014 Hi Christiaan, I would go with the Raid 5 as well as Time Machine (or Chronosync). Yes, you don't get as much storage, but for the time it takes to restore from Time Machine, the RAID 5 setup would pay for itself. Also I would add an offsite backup to the mix. I am sure you know the adage, 'If it is not in three places, it is not backed up". We have just moved from an Xserve with external shared drives. We found, that we were not getting anywhere near maxing out the CPU (10-20%), as the traffic was mostly disc read/write and not processor. Now we have moved to a Mac Mini Server + multiple enclosure thunderbolt RAID 5 setup. I am no longer fully in the loop with IT, but I believe we have a RAID 5, 4 bay enclosure for our data, partitioned to reflect the previous drive setup. We have a second RAID 5, 4 bay enclosure doing an nightly mirrored backup (only of the previous days work) using Chronosync (not Time Machine). The main drive is also incrementally backed up nightly, to off site cloud backup. Also we have a dual drive mirrored disk for archived projects, that are also backed up to CD/DVD. As you can see, we have backups, on backups, on backups. Hopefully this new system prevents some of the challenges we have had with drive failures in the past. Hope that helps. 1 Quote Link to comment
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