Advice On a Small Design Studio Server / Storage For 2 Macs

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Advice On a Small Design Studio Server / Storage For 2 Macs

We are a small design team operating 2 iMacs (2013 Intel i5).

We are currently working live using Adobe Creative Cloud Suite (Mostly Illustrator, Photoshop & Bridge) off an 11 year old 32bit Windows 2003 server accessing 3TB of stored data, we are connected to this via ethernet CAT5e through a gigabit network switch.

We are looking to replace this as current setup as it very slow and we cannot work to 2 macs off the server simultaneously very well at all. If one of the macs is saving the data is bottlenecking causing the other mac to freeze. Our average file size is between 500mb & 1gb.

We are open to suggestions on the best setup anyone can recommend, we have been looking into NAS or Thunderbolt Raided Drives which could simply sit next to the 2 machines but looking at different peoples experiences it seems very varied on results this would give in terms of working from it simultaneously. If this is an option we would then need to figure out a way to back these drives up.

As you can probably tell from my wording above we are not technically minded so please can you give me your suggestions in layman's terms.

Really hope you guys can help 🙂

Thanks in advance!

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Sep 21, 2015 4:23 AM

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Answer 1

cdhw

Level 4

3,594 points

Sep 22, 2015 1:29 AM in response to Lucy McMillan

Promise Pegasus 2 R4 drives, via thunderbolt to a 2014 Mac Mini server are my current favourite for a mid-range low-cost solution. I have been very pleased with the performance. 1 GB files are not particularly 'large' these days. As long as you get 16GB of RAM for your server so it can do lots of caching, your network will be the bottleneck. If your switch is up to it, get a Thunderbolt-Ethernet adaptor and bond the two interfaces to get 2Gb/s transfer rate. I doubt that reading and writing files at the same time will be an issue.

I'm not a fan of NAS solutions as file servers in Mac environments, particularly if fast R/W is the goal. I'm not claiming satisfactory products don't exist, but I've kissed a few frogs and haven't found my prince yet.

C.

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Answer 2

Sep 22, 2015 2:13 AM in response to cdhw

Thanks for your advice CDHW.

Like I said I am not technically minded so please bear with me. I have attached a visual of how I think you described the setup?

Does this mean we would be working from the Promise Pegasus via the Mac Mini Server? As the Mac Mini 2014 Server only has 2 thunderbolt ports does this mean we would use the thunderbolt - ethernet adapter to connect the Mac Mini Server to the Raid Drive?

Really appreciate your advice 🙂

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