What if you need more than 3TB of disk?

I'm going to get an iMac but the biggest disk offered is 3TB.

I'm coming from a Windows world where you can buy whatever tower/motherboard/etc. you want and stuff it with drives. With the iMac, I'll probably get the 3TB Fusion but I have more than that...mostly audio/video + project files for stuff I work on.

So what does the Mac nation typically do in this situation? I could...

• go with an external hard drive. Thunderbolt looks fast, though lack of RAID disturbs me. I hate hard drive failures. For the iMac I'm going to marry it with a TimeCapsule but the biggest, AGAIN, offered there is 3TB.
• go with a NAS appliance. Easy to get as much space as you want with RAID, but network access is a lot slower.

I don't know what the limit in size is for an external, but perhaps instead of the relatively more expensive Time Capsule (per GB cost) you could use a larger external drive and partition it. I have my small external partitioned for Time Machine and it works well.

Mac's are definitely different than Windows computers (less configurable). My vote is get an external drive (multiple of necessary).

- Nick

Look at raid systems with a thunderbolt interface, expensive but they will meet your needs.

I have a LaCie 2x3TB external drive, configured as RAID 1 and connected with Thunderbolt. It works great for my purposes (a media store connected to my Mac Mini as my hub).

You can daisy-chain pretty much as many drives as you like together as long as you buy kit with enough connectors. If there is a hard-limit I'm sure one of the gurus will know!

I'm not sure where you got the impression that you can't do RAID on Thunderbolt, but its mistaken -- I've seen all kinds of RAID enclosures available for TB connections. Thunderbolt will be plenty fast compared to the internal drive, and things like media projects/multimedia files are probably best being housed in an external RAID for redundancy anyway -- you wouldn't want to have anything "irreplaceable" only located on one internal drive that can't be easily swapped out anyway without external backups.

Has the OP had time to investigate the Thunderbolt raid options yet?

For good redundancy I'd recommend a raid 5, or even better 6 system. You may have to balance the cost of an ideal system to your budget. Look at the Promise Pegasus raids. I've installed these for customers and the Apple Store can supply them.

chas_m said:

I'm not sure where you got the impression that you can't do RAID on Thunderbolt

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I wasn't clear - I'm disturbed by lack of RAID on the Mac.

But maybe I just need to update my mindset. I haven't built a PC with a single drive in 15-odd years. I realize HDDs have gotten more reliable but still, if it fails, everything stops and you have to go and get it fixed, whereas if it was RAID-1 or RAID-5 you can keep working and replace at your leisure. I just hate trusting a single HDD and my paranoia has served me well in the past

I'm planning on TimeMachine + CrashPlan so perhaps maybe I should just be happy with that, given the unlikelihood of disk failure in the next 4-5 years on a new PC.

techiesteve said:

Has the OP had time to investigate the Thunderbolt raid options yet?

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A little. They're expensive. Still looking at options...I'll probably either end up keeping my Windows PC as a file server, adding some NAS capacity and moving less performance-sensitive stuff there (e.g., video files), or going the Thunderbolt route.

Thanks for all the excellent advice/commentary.