External Drive for Mac Studio with Mac Display

ANY enclosure that can hold enough drives can solve this problem. It needs nothing special.

• Concatenated RAID is not really RAID at all, it is "just a bunch of drives" aka JBOD, pasted together and acting as if it were one HUGE drive. So you can take two larger drives, concatenate them into one Volume, and have a really big Backup drive, for example.

Disk Utility can do that directly.

The R in RAID is for redundant, but RAID is NOT backup!

• Mirrored RAID is used to reduce the time-to-repair after a failure, and to keep drive failures from becoming a data disaster. It does not protect from human error, crazy software, or 'just-because' failures.

• Striped RAID can be somewhat faster in some cases (especially in an array built from Rotating Magnetic drives), but it is brittle, and you MUST have another copy nearby in case of failure. A striped RAID failure destroys EVERYTHING on it, with No hope of recovery. Most users would be better served by a faster SSD than a striped rotating magnetic RAID.

• Concatenated RAID is not really RAID at all, it is "just a bunch of drives" aka JBOD, pasted together and acting as if it were one HUGE drive. So you can take two larger drives, concatenate them into one Volume, and have a really big Backup drive, for example.

• RAID 5 computes checksums of the data blocks (in real-time, coming and going), and stores two copies of the data AND the checksum blocks in such a way that a failure in any one of the three drives still allows the data can to be recovered from the other two drives. It requires checksum-computing hardware to be seen as anywhere near fast enough for most uses.

Criticisms of RAID-5 include the cost and delays induced by the extra hardware, and the HUGE amount of time it takes to re-create a large data set using RAID-5. Re-creation time is so large, another drive is non-trivially likely to fail in the time it takes to re-create the data, making the entire concept shaky.

Executive summary: Most users would be better served using multiple drives to make multiple backups, rather than dedicating multiple drives to RAID arrays.

The room goes quiet because a NAS not better for one or two Macs. A NAS (or any computer acting as a Server computer) really shines when it is at the heart of a busy cluster, being accessed from all over the place at high speeds.

Problems with a NAS include that it is not MacOS, it is not locally-attached (so it takes longer to get to your data), and it really has no clear advantages over a large drive enclosure, or several drive enclosures, directly connected to your Mac.

You can get enclosures that use 3 ½" ,"2 ½ or M.2 NVMe drives.

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/thunderbolt/drive-enclosures

I have a 4-bay Thunderbolt 2 enclosure connected via a Thunderbolt ¾ to 2 adapter. I purchased the enclosure for my 2013 Mac Pro.

No. Completely off base.

The R in RAID is for redundant, but RAID is NOT backup!

• Mirrored RAID is used to reduce the time-to-repair after a failure, and to keep drive failures from becoming a data disaster. It does not protect from human error, crazy software, or 'just-because' failures.

• Striped RAID can be somewhat faster in some cases (especially in an array built from Rotating Magnetic drives), but it is brittle, and you MUST have another copy nearby in case of failure. A striped RAID failure destroys EVERYTHING on it, with No hope of recovery. Most users would be better served by a faster SSD than a striped rotating magnetic RAID.

• Concatenated RAID is not really RAID at all, it is "just a bunch of drives" aka JBOD, pasted together and acting as if it were one HUGE drive. So you can take two larger drives, concatenate them into one Volume, and have a really big Backup drive, for example.

• RAID 5 computes checksums of the data blocks (in real-time, coming and going), and stores two copies of the data AND the checksum blocks in such a way that a failure in any one of the three drives still allows the data can to be recovered from the other two drives. It requires checksum-computing hardware to be seen as anywhere near fast enough for most uses.

Criticisms of RAID-5 include the cost and delays induced by the extra hardware, and the HUGE amount of time it takes to re-create a large data set using RAID-5. Re-creation time is so large, another drive is non-trivially likely to fail in the time it takes to re-create the data, making the entire concept shaky.

Executive summary: Most users would be better served using multiple drives to make multiple backups, rather than dedicating multiple drives to RAID arrays.

In the US, apple-centric vendor OWC/Macsales has a good reputation because they pride themselves on their support. They don't sell any products that are "difficult" when used on a Mac.

and yes, they sell 0GB enclosures. Sometimes you have to look a a larger one, then click an option button for 0GB size.

Outside the US, you can use their products as a guide, and purchase comparable products in your market.

With that much storage to work with, you might want to consider getting a NAS.

Sure.

But where will your backup be?