Mac Mini Storage Solution (w/ existing hardware) - Any advice?

[Tom_M]

Hi everyone,

 

Just needing a second opinion on a proposed new storage solution for our small business network.

 

I manage a Creative Media firm & in the process of changing our central storage. Previously we were using Dell PowerEdge Servers to host file shares; however we've just upgraded to a Mac Mini M1 w/ 10GbE.

 

We have an older LaCie 8Big Thunderbolt Enclosure w/ SATA III 4TB Drives which used to be connected to one of the Mac Pro's directly. Our new proposed solution would be to connect the LaCie 8Big directly to the new Mac Mini & use this as a File Server and migrate the shares over etc (w/ all of the clients also being 10GbE ready).

 

From my understanding, Thunderbolt 2 (albeit, yes - it's 2 generations old now) is 'faster' than the throughput of SATA III SSD's & should be fine performance wise?

 

However, as we'd be using 8 of the drives (the LaCie has a RAID controller & we'd be using RAID 10) - would the maximum throughput of Thunderbolt 2 be a bottleneck at all? (SATA III = 6Gbps | Thunderbolt 2 = 20Gbps) - Would a Thunderbolt 3/4 solution be a better option & gain extra performance if we're using SATA III SSD's?

 

I'm not normally used to dealing with Thunderbolt (actively avoided it for years). However, until the new Mac Pro appears - using this solution for the next 6-12 months looks to be better than using our current (ageing) PowerEdge hardware.

 

Our main work is in Music Production & odd bits of video editing (very rare these days). We'd have 5 computers (maximum) running Pro Tools and would be writing a 4GB file over the network every 15 minutes to the Server during the working day.

 

Hopefully the above is enough for someone to offer some feedback/guidance?