For many years I used a Promise Pegasus, and 2 Promise Pegasus2 DAS (Direct Attached Storage) enclosures for my storage needs. When I first picked up the Mac change I really embraced the 10G Thunderbolt experience. When I picked up the 2013 Mac Pro system that had Thunderbolt2 connectivity it was great. All of my photography and random data worked super fast across the 6 drive setup. When I decided to rip my DVD and Blu-Ray movie collection I quickly ran out of space and that is when I picked up the second Pegasus2 unit.

Fast forward to 2020 and I finally decide it is time to consider upgrading the 2013 Mac Pro. Along came 2021 and the Apple Silicon M1 powered Mac’s. I liked the updated power and decided to update my MacBook Pro first. In doing so I decided it was time to finally update my storage to a NAS versus a DAS. BUT I did not want to spend the money just yet. So I picked up the Thunderbolt2 to USB-C adapter to continue to use my 3 DAS units. That was the first step in figuring out that the world has evolved for me and my storage needs.

I had to ‘modify’ the security of the MacBook Pro to load the driver to get the DAS to work. I guess Promise and Apple did not come to some agreement to keep my solution working. So now I finally decide it is time to get on with the NAS solution.

After some research I land on TrueNAS for my choice. Spent about a year looking at all of the options from QNAP, Synology, and TerraMaster. TrueNAS was where I landed on as my solution. I needed to replace my 30TB, 20TB and 3TB DAS’s and I wanted to do it in one enclosure rather than 3. So I picked up 5 Western Digital Gold drives to get me 100TB of raw storage to go inside my Mini X+ system. I picked the Mini X+ so that I could have the 10G connection to increase the speed of transfers within my network. I fortified it with a SFP+ nic card added into it. So I can do local connections from my systems along with general usage.

With this setup I went with a RAIDZ2 configuration. This means I have roughly 54TB of storage usable BUT I have a fault of 2 drives before I start to have risk of losing my data. I also picked up 2 drives from one source and 3 drives from another source to increase the odds that the drives came from different batches.

After a little bit of setup pain that was self inflicted I am very happy with my decision. I successfully have backed up all of my MacOS systems and migrated my 23TB of data from the 3 DAS units. I have one more MacOS system to replace and I will be complete. My next step is to work on getting the Windows users systems backed up as well as my Linux systems.

I am planning my 3-2-1 backup solution and Right now I have the first step, with plans for the second step based on getting a disk shelf to take the 16 drives from the DAS and set it up to replicate with the Mini X+. The hard part of 3-2-1 is finding a remote place.

I encourage everyone to take some time to think about their data and take the steps secure their data in case of loss.