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I would say, the hunt is on. If your are like me, having a old Mac Pro, with 4x HDD (8 TB total) and your preparing for the new Mac Pro (yeah!). Then the question becomes: where do you move your old MP data to something new?

Two candidates:

  • LaCie BIG5 Thunderbolt
  • G-Dock EV Thunderbolt

You can't not really compare these, however for the moment their the only 2 products i could find.

My Thoughts:

I like that the LaCie is BIG (starts with 10TB), on the other side the G is easy to extend and you can easily take one HDD and hook-it up with your Macbook as a external disk (sweet).

However, the G EV series seems only to come in 1 TB disks (thats a bummer). And -as far as i know-- no possibility for extra (empty) enclosures (where you can put in your own (2TB) disks). Im not sure about the ambient level, i hate fans running all the time, so keeping it low as possible is welcome!

So, finally, my question is, what would be a good extension for your HDD space, and how are you guys thinking of 'solving' this? The SSD that comes with the MP will not be enough for the most of us!

My criteria:

  • thunderbolt 2
  • low noise
  • easy to expand (hot swap?)
  • possibility for LAN connection?

Edit 1:

I didn't mentioned it, but the new MP are fitted with TB2 (20 gbps vs 10 gbps), which means a TB1 drive doesn't take full advantage of the available TB2 connections.

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  • If there's a practical problem you seek to solve, let's edit that in and also consider leaving the justification / thinking for an answer. It's perfectly fine to ask a simple question (what storage does X) and then shift much of the reasoning to the answer.
    – bmike ♦
    Oct 29, 2013 at 22:24
  • @bmike, thanks, your right. It a 'wide' question and hard (for me) to describe. I tried to update it to the 'core'. However, I do hope for a bit of a discussion, since Apple's new approach will make us think about this. You can not put your disks in a cabinet, and pull a long cable. With TB it needs to be somewhere close, so you want silent and expandability. I'm curious how MP owners are going to solve that.
    – Roger
    Oct 29, 2013 at 22:34
  • I love it - your edit focuses the problem. What should you do to host 8 TB of data and access it over thunderbolt. Well done.
    – bmike ♦
    Oct 29, 2013 at 23:28

3 Answers 3

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The Pegasus R2 disk enclosures use Thunderbolt2 (newest Thunderbolt spec, 20Gb/s) and they come in diskless configurations (you put your own existing Mac Pro disks right in) or pre-populated configurations. I already ordered the diskless model for myself. No network support, however.

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We've been using the Drobo 5D with Mac Mini servers for a while and have been quite happy. I think they'd make a pleasant addition to the '13 MP.

They're Thunderbolt (or the 5N model is a network option), very quite and hot swap. In addition to supporting five 3.5" drives they have an mSATA to cache and accelerate commonly accessed files. I'd imagine one (or two) would fit nicely on your desk next to your new MP.

A few notes, that may be advantages or disadvantages depending on your usage. Drobo's only support the proprietary "BeyondRaid" technology. That means you can't just drop your existing drives right in and access the data. The drives must first be formatted by the system (thus wiping any existing data). Also, again because of the BeyondRaid, you loose some disk space (similar to RAID-5 or RAID-6, depending on your configuration). So filling up the 5 bays with 4TB drives results in ~14.5TB of usable storage. However you can have a drive fail, replace it and have it automatically rebuilt without ever un-mounting the volume.

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It took a bit of time, i think the new LaCie 2big and 5big are pretty decent. thunderbolt 2!

Huge amount of storage, and should be silent. Unfortunately its TB2/USB3 only, no LAN connection.

Now waiting for my new MacPro. Can't wait.

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