Converting a MacPro to a RAID/Server connect to/through 1 iMac

You're apparently not looking for RAID here, except as a secondary or tertiary consideration to other features and requirements. The "some kind of a personal cloud" is a rather larger project than RAID, too. This is probably better suited to a separate posting and separate question. (These mixed-question threads tend to confuse me, unfortunately.)

Some comments and some suggestions, in no particular order...

An old Mac Pro is not known for its power consumption characteristics, and maintaining the older boxes also involves sourcing what are increasingly older pieces and parts and hard disks.

Many of the older Mac Pro boxes aren't supported on current macOS, with all that that currently and eventually entails. The Mac Pro (early 2008) tops out at 10.11.6.

Exposing older boxes to the Internet does get noticed by folks on the 'net rather quickly, too; usually within minutes.

You're also limited by local network speeds and availability. If you've a fast ISP connection, this is less of an issue. But sometimes it's better to cache the images on a VPS or hosted system of your own or on some other provider, and those can be had inexpensively. Pushing a lot of big images over a slow ISP link is never fun.

Some of the web hosting services I deal with offer storage and other hosting services, either optionally or as part of their hosting packages. There are some hosting providers that offer hosted Mac systems in addition to the many other options that are available, too.

If I had to run an older and down-revision box, I'd probably want to place it behind a firewall and use a VPN to access the device. I'd not want to host mail or web or other services, as older revisions of those tend to have known vulnerabilities. I'd not expose systems offering file shares directly to the 'net, even on current versions. VPN only, for those.

As a potential alternative to re-cycling older Mac Pro hardware or reloading it with some other operating system, or of acquiring a newer Mac mini running current macOS and current Server.app or such, I'd suggest looking at an approach based on a Synology box, or on a FreeNAS or OwnCloud installation. Or alternatives.

This unless you want to get into the business of configuring and managing and troubleshooting and otherwise dealing with the various network services, and particularly with maintaining and securing the servers. Older systems that aren't getting patches will accrete security problems and will increasingly encounter problems with secure network connections, too. macOS 10.11.6 isn't bad here, but not that much further back is already having connectivity issues due to too-old TLS support. Servers and server management is also an inherently more complex undertaking as compared with clients and client management.

What was your conclusion? I was hoping to turn a late Mac Pro 2008 model into a NAS so I could access 4K still images offsite like an NAS as I am a creative professional and would like to have some kind of a personal cloud. I invested in some hard drives and time into converting the mac into this, but only succeeded in making it a local server good for media streaming, not so good for remote access connection. ****. I dunno, though, is there a cheap and simple way to do this? or can someone confirm, I should just purchase an NAS for a large storage, remote access, low power consumption personal cloud solution? Huge thanks in advance for anyone who even reads this, let alone responds. Cheers!

-Kkoala

You can set up a SAN with the Mac Pro as the server, and use a Thunderbolt to Fiber Channel interface to connect it directly to the Mac Pro. Then you can share the RAID volume via file sharing (SMB, AFP, etc). This would satisfy the requirements for maximum transfer rates between the iMac and the Mac Pro, and also the NAS aspect.

However, this would be somewhat cost-ineffective to implement if you do not already have the necessary hardware. Can you tell me what drives are in the RAID 1 set, and if it is a hardware RAID or software implementation? I could probably suggest a more economical solution if I knew there was a bottleneck somewhere that would obviate at least the FC connection between the iMac and the Mac Pro.

Gigabit Ethernet is slower than a direct-connected Thunderbolt device. This means its not possible for a remote Mac Pro to operate as quickly as a direct-connected Thunderbolt RAID array on the iMac, for instance — all the network traffic to and from the storage has to traverse the Gigabit-speed network, and the Mac Pro, and the storage bus and storage device in the Mac Pro.

Easiest and (from the iMac) fastest, connect a Thunderbolt array to the iMac, and configure the iMac to offer file shares to other systems via the Sharing preferences panel.

If you want to get into configuring a server, that's rather more complex undertaking — setting up storage, IP networking, DNS and other networking services, etc — and I'd really not recommend using a macOS server to host files for Windows systems. The macOS Server configuration work, but it'll usually be easier to use a Windows Server configuration for that. But if you really want to use that Mac Pro and if it'll run Sierra, load Sierra and acquire Server.app (macOS Server) and configure that for file sharing and other local services. (Getting older versions of these tools is possible, but if the App Store won't let you buy the older version, you'll have to contact Apple to get a redemption code.) For remote storage access, you'll still be limited by the speed of the Gigabit link, at best. Some other part of the path may be slower yet.

Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (FC SAN) is another option, but that's far more expensive than what you'll probably want to spend. Most any FC SAN is faster than a Gigabit network link, too. But that Mac Pro isn't set up to be a SAN controller, and you'd need FC SAN adapters for your iMac and the Mac Pro for best performance. Again, not cheap, and probably more complex than what you want to deal with, too.

As an alternative to using that Mac Pro for storage and much cheaper than a FC SAN configuration, Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems are available from various vendors, and these are purpose-built for storage and other tasks. Synology NAS devices are discussed in various topics here in the forums, as well as elsewhere on the network. There are also open-source alternatives, such as the FreeNAS package. (These NAS devices are usually easier than configuring and managing a server configuration, too.)

Probably already obvious, but sometimes this gets missed: RAID protects (only) against disk failures. Backups are still required for best data availability, as volume corruptions and file deletions and other such can still arise, and RAID will not help avoid those. RAID is not a backup alternative.

The above should give you some search terms for looking around, too.

Completely in agreement with you, but Gigabit Ethernet would have been the next thing I would have suggested, since I suspect he has 7200rpm HDD's in the RAID 1, which would be the biggest bottleneck. With Server 5 now supporting SMB3, bandwidth may not be a bottleneck depending on his setup.

If your RAID is super high performance, though, FC SAN is the way to go with Xsan for easy setup. I can send you a 4Gbps FC HBA and SFP's to get you started, but the thunderbolt Sanlink products aren't cheap, and neither are the fiber cables themselves. (Migrating to 8G FC, so I have PCI-e cards to spare.)

Oh and I have been assuming you have the older workstation looking Mac Pro, not the trash can Mac Pro, is this correct?

Ted Park wrote:

Oh and I forgot to add, with FC SAN, you have the added benefit of having the array appear as a directly mounted volume on the iMac, rather than a network share point.

All true, certainly.

For simple shared storage where switched gigabit networking is adequate performance (and maybe with upgraded switches if or when that becomes necessary), a host-local DAS direct-attached storage RAID or a NAS network-attached storage RAID array will usually be less expensive solution than a SAN array and the FC HBA fiber channel host bus adapters, and simpler to manage. Not as robust against failures as a FC SAN fiber channel storage area network can be configured, as either the host or the storage array can be offline, though recovery by swapping or by rolling in backups suffices for many folks using the network-attached or host-attached approach.

Yes, a FC SAN array does appear to be locally-connected storage, once the host has been configured. That presentation can be handy for a number of cases.

As for adding FC SAN connections into the environment and building up, this configuration is multi-platform. I'm not aware of any shared multi-platform SAN software available here; no analog to Xsan that works across macOS and Windows. Folks usually then configure and operate file services — SMB, et al — for those cases. Once (if) there's (only) a single host serving storage access, some of the strengths of a SAN are greatly diminished. Configuring only macOS systems, serving out Xsan storage from multiple SAN arrays via SMB to the Windows systems is certainly feasible. But that's a fairly complex configuration. (Then there's authentication and DNS and other topics, as these shared-storage environments commonly grow into more complex environments as the folks start looking at details such as access control and host names and networking.)

And then there's the SAN zoning and WWIDs (don't ask) and a whole pile of scanning and configuration management "fun" that arises with FC SAN configurations. Once configured and with hosts that either need isolated and non-shared storage (into a shared pool of storage or otherwise) or that have clustering-capable file systems, SANs can and do work very well.

Disclosure: I configure, use, tune and troubleshoot SANs, and I utterly loathe the typical vendor user interfaces, including the per-vendor and per-OS terminology inconsistencies and arcana that seemingly inevitably arise with most SANs. But then I've sometimes been called a curmudgeon, too.

TL;DR: I'd probably hang a DAS RAID array off the iMac and serve storage from there as needed, or maybe configure internal storage or a DAS RAID array off the Mac Pro and configure and run macOS Server there, if that Mac Pro can run current software. And something to do backups of the storage to and from, as hardware failures are inevitable, and corruptions and accidental deletions can and do arise. Sometimes intentional deletions and intentional corruptions. One client system that's acquired some ransomware can clobber all of the storage accessible to that system, too. And if that Mac Pro can't run current macOS software, that's also going to lead to some increasing issues around access and security as it further ages out.

Mac Pro mid 2010 can run macOS Sierra with current Server.app, so converting that to a storage and network server is feasible. Running a server is more complex than running a client, and provides rather more capabilities.

While SMB storage and DNS and SMTP mail server and other services all work fine in mixed environments, macOS isn't a good choice for providing authentication for Windows systems. Windows Server with Active Directory works better for that. macOS can be integrated with Windows Server running Active Directory, too.

Beyond the four internal storage bays — that's an upgrade, and there was an internal Apple RAID card around for Mac Pro, if you can find and scrounge one — that Mac Pro can also be upgraded for various PCIe storage controllers and external storage arrays, though that's yet more added hardware. I'd probably go with SAS or SATA there and not with FC HBAs and SAN array storage, if going single-host with the storage; with DAS over SAN.

If you do decide to add multiple macOS hosts accessing shared FC SAN storage, you're going to need Xsan software. That's needed to keep the different hosts from stepping on each other. This is the flip side of that disks-appear-to-be-local detail that was mentioned earlier. The FC SAN storage access isn't being mediated and coordinated through an SMB file server application on the file server and the local SMB client software on the clients. And you're either going to need to share the FC SAN storage to the Windows systems via SMB from the Mac via Gigabit Ethernet, or you're going to have to install FC HBAs in various clients and also partition the FC SAN storage such that it isn't shared across hosts without coordination to avoid the Gigabit links. There's no Xsan software available for Microsoft Windows.

So you are looking to share the 1TB SATA HDD’s in software RAID 1 through Disk Utility, is that correct?

If that’s the case, a gigabit connection would provide more than adequate bandwidth so as to not present a bottleneck as far as data transfer rates go.

If you are using the storage for anything real-timey though, (video editing, etc) then latency could be an issue though.

So I will present another option, though it is pretty yucky.

Firewire 800.

Boot the Mac Pro in Target Disk mode, connect it to the iMac with a FireWire cable, and share the volume with simple File sharing in the iMac. This is kind of disgusting and a waste of a Mac Pro, but,

1. 800Mbps would be more than fast enough for the 7200RPM hard drives you have in the Mac Pro

2. It wouldn’t be sharing the bandwidth of the gigabit network you have

3. It would show up as directly attached storage

4. You would experience minimal latency

This would be the equivalent of using the Mac Pro as a very expensive hard drive enclosure, but I feel like it would satisfy all your requirements.

If I were in you position though, I would not do this, as it is so mindblowingly counterintuitive. I would personally set up Xsan, the Windows equivalent is StorNext (in the past Xsan was basically a port of stornext, not sure of what it actually is now). If you are in the US, I can send you two 4gbps FC HBA’s with SFP’s for price of shipping (around 10 bucks), get a Thunderbolt PCIe box like this, and connect the iMac and Mac Pro with FC.

Let us know which way you choose to go though, I’m curious 😀

Oh and I forgot to add, with FC SAN, you have the added benefit of having the array appear as a directly mounted volume on the iMac, rather than a network share point.