How much attached storage can a mac server handle? What would be the best suggestion for this?

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How much attached storage can a mac server handle? What would be the best suggestion for this?

Hello, hopefully I am in the correct location, if not, i apologize. Please bear with me as I am fairly new to MAC server. Here is my dillema. I have a mac graphics group that uses about 6TB of storage currently on a Windows server. We are running into issues such as permissions and searching inability. I was considering moving them to a mac server but will need to add storage to this. What would be recommended for such large disk space? We do currenlty have 2 mac mini servers and all the users are bound to AD as well. Thank you in advance for any suggestions!

Mac mini, OS X Server

Posted on May 20, 2013 7:06 AM

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Answer 1

May 20, 2013 8:48 AM in response to jockeygirl

A Mac can handle more storage than you can afford 🙂

I would suggest a Mac mini with a Promise Thunderbolt RAID, see http://www.promise.com/storage/raid_series.aspx?m=192&region=en-global&rsn1=40&r sn3=47

With 6 x 4TB drives in the R6 model you can have 19TB of usable space. In theory you could daisy-chain 6 of these units to one Mac mini giving you a total of 6 x 19TB = over 114TB of space.

An alternative approach is to connect a Mac server to a SAN storage system, the above solution is often described as DAS (Direct Attached Storage).

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Answer 2

MrHoffman

Level 10

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May 20, 2013 12:39 PM in response to jockeygirl

One of the Mac Mini Server boxes I deal with has 24 TB hanging off of the box (configured as RAID-6), plus a two-disk RAID-1 mirror set inside the box. That's also a pretty small configuration, both in terms of its physical size and in terms of its storage capacity in the grand scheme of things.

A Mac Pro or Mac Pro Server will do 8 TB inside the box, plus a whole lot more outside the box either direct-attached storage (DAS) or via a Storage Area Network (SAN) configuration, but the performance of a Mac Pro Server is probably overkill for your needs, too.

As much as you are focusing on the capacity, you'll also want to look at how you'll archive and manage that much storage. At how you'll manage and conduct backups of your data.

You'll also be looking at the speed and the design of your network, if you're moving large files around regularly. Gigabit Ethernet does pretty well for small groups, but you may be looking for a different setup of that's not fast enough.

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