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I went out to grab some dinner (I shouldn't leave, ever, apparently), and came back to the RAID offline with just a power light, no USB or drive lights.I recently added a 2010 apple raid card to one of my flashed 2009 mac pros. This provides the performance of a two-drive stripe with the data redundancy of a pair of mirrors.Major update: The QNAP box failed tonight (Aug 3) after running flawlessly for three days straight. Using a 4-bay RAID enclosure like the ThunderBay 4, along with SoftRAID, the best RAID utility for the Mac, allows you to configure the ThunderBay 4 enclosure as a RAID 10 array, striping the data across a pair of mirrors (RAID 1).

SoftRAID for Windows 1.0.7 Brings TRIM to Cross-Platform RAID. How Secure Boot and System Integrity Protection Guard Your Mac From Malware. Control-click the folder that you added, then choose Advanced Options from the shortcuts menu that appears.Get the Fastest Speeds Possible for Your Mac With RAID 0 + SoftRAID. From the Shared Folders list on the right, click the add button (+), then choose a folder to use for Time Machine backups. From the list of services on the left, select File Sharing.

In the interim, I've put my new drives in external enclosures, and I'll just use Carbon Copy Cloner to mirror them every 30 minutes or so. I've ordered a different unit, with a different chipset in it, but it won't be here for about a week. (All my data was gone, thoughвЂ”thankfully I had literally cloned the drive just before I went out.)Needless to say, the QNAP box is going back. I then pulled the drives from the array and dropped each into my drive dock, and they were both fine.

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And that's why they say, 'RAID is not a backup!' 1 Many RAID levels duplicate your data, but if something happens to the RAID box itself, the data is toast.So what happened, how'd I recover, and what's my new plan going forward?As background, since 2014 I've used a LaCie 5Big Thunderbolt 2 as my external RAID box. While I was out of town, no less. And it's a good thing I did, as last week, my external RAID box died in spectacular fashion. Until last week, I had it split between the internal SSD (work and personal files I access a lot), an external 6TB USB drive (archive stuff I want to keep but not regularly access), and an external 8TB RAID box (a whole bunch of music, movies, home videos, work videos, etc.)Being paranoid, I also had relatively goodвЂ”but not bulletproof, as I discoveredвЂ“backup strategies for all of these things.

While the LaCie could handle one drive dying for sure, two if they were the 'right' two, there's no way could it handle three dead drives. When I got back from my trip, I looked through the log file, and it seemed to indicate that three drives failed at the exact same timeвЂ”and the odds of that being true seem incredibly low. It continued to work greatвЂ¦right up until it failed. I had three drives fail over that time, and each time, the hot spare seamlessly came online and resynced its data. To do that, it uses four drives, and the fifth is a 'hot spare' that takes over automatically in the event a single drive fails.Over the years, the LaCie worked great for me.

So I used Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to restore the backed-up data from the offsite drive to my new storage solution.But what'd I restore the data to, you may be asking? That was, indeed, the trickiest part of this process: What to use going forward for my storage solution?I got back to town last Thursday afternoon, and I wanted to get my data back as quickly as possibleвЂ”especially as my iTunes (yes, still on Mojave), Usher, and Photos collections were on the RAID array. In the end, all I lost was a handful of iPhone photos (thankfully, nothing irreplaceable in that small batch). But, as you can see, there's no true real-time backup in here, nor is there an online component.Thankfully, the timing worked out well, as we'd made an offsite backup just a couple days before I left town, and my often-changed work and personal files are on other drives. Then, once a week, I would clone the array to a drive that my wife keeps at her office.

The plan would be to purchase two drives, and use CCC to clone one to the other on a regular (and automatic) basis.The advantage of this approach would be that the drives are truly separateвЂ”each has its own power supply, so I wouldn't lose multiple drives at once due to a failed power supply. So while I could go with the first option, they are really expensive, and not really needed if I wasn't going to use RAID10.I seriously considered separate external hard drives, such as the LaCie Professional 10TB external drive, which uses enterprise-class hard drives and includes a five-year warranty. The other issue with such a box is that if I ever wanted to expand its capacity, I'd have to replace four drives at a time, which gets pricey. A hybrid approach with RAID and separate drivesAs much as I liked my RAID10 setup, this crash has instilled a fear of stripes (RAID 0, which is part of RAID10) in me: The problem is that if you have an issue, even if the drive is perfectly fine, you can't get to the data on that drive unless it's in the array, because not all the data exists on any one drive. A new multi-disk RAID10 box from LaCie or PROMISE

Seagate Exos X16 10TB Enterprise class hard drive (x2) Here's exactly what I'm using: In addition, as good as CCC is, the copying wouldn't be real time, leaving me open to at least some level of possible data loss.So in the end, I chose a hybrid approach: I'm using a two-drive RAID enclosure with separately purchased drives, plus a single super-fast Thunderbolt 3 NVME drive in an enclosure.

But why an extra drive when a single RAID box worked for me before?I decided that now was a good time to move my Photos library from the RAID box to something faster: I tend to launch, browse, and quit Photos multiple times a day, and my database is 1.3TB in size, so I wanted it to be speedier. While that may sound expensive, it's less than half the cost of a big five- or six-bay RAID box with drivesвЂ”Apple sells the six-bay 24TB PROMISE Pegasus32 R6 for $2,299, which is comparable to what the LaCie cost back in 2014. PNY CS2130 2TB M.2 PCIe NVMe Gen3 x4 SSDIn total, this setup cost $1,001 ($759 for the 10TB drives and RAID box $242 for the NVME and enclosure).

Plugged in that way, it scored 422MB/S in write and 415MB/s read. For comparison, an external spinning-platter USB3 drive I have scores in the 165MB/s rangeвЂ”yikes!I then moved the drive to a USB3 hub that was connected to another USB3 hub which was finally connected to the iMac. However, copying seemed incredibly slow, so I checked with the Blackmagic Disk Speed app, and was shocked at the results: 27MB/s write and 42MB/s read. I first connected it directly to a USB3 port on the back of the iMac, as the Thunderbolt 3 ports were full at that time (I was still trying to save the RAID box). And the thing is tiny, making it very easy to take with me when I travel.I did run into one anomaly when connecting the drive. This isn't quite as fast as the internal NVMe in my iMac (in the 1,300MB/s range), but it's notably faster than USB3 SSDs, and miles ahead of any traditional hard drive.

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