I am using an OWC Thunderbolt 3 Dock to successfully connect a RAID array box to my M1 MBP via FireWire. I read that the new MacOS has dropped FireWire support, but does my Dock need it?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Original Title: Thunderbolt 3 dock
MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 15.6
ProfessorVideo wrote:
I am using an OWC Thunderbolt 3 Dock to successfully connect a RAID array box to my M1 MBP via FireWire. I read that the new MacOS has dropped FireWire support, but does my Dock need it?
Your Dock already has it. FW800 support is built into the Dock.
I think you are asking if Tahoe doesn't support FW but your Dock does, will FW drives still work with the Dock. The answer is probably yes. The Firewire PHY is in the Dock. The Dock is connected to your Mac via Thunderbolt 3, so your Mac only "sees" the Thunderbolt connection to the Dock. All the outbound connections from the Dock (USB 3.1, FW, S/PDIF, MDP) are handled by the Dock.
That said, only time will tell ...
ProfessorVideo wrote:
what is current thinking on the best technology for a redundant (ie safe) storage box to work on USB-C, and offer say 8TB of space? Max budget low hundreds!
8TB ... but ... how many drives ... and does it need to be RAID capable?
ProfessorVideo wrote:
It is a good question though - what is current thinking on the best technology for a redundant (ie safe) storage box to work on USB-C, and offer say 8TB of space? Max budget low hundreds!
You can get desktop hard drive mechanisms these days that hold up to 20 – 22 TB each.
If you're going to be using them in a RAID, you want to be sure that they use Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR), not Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). SMR drives cannot cleanly overwrite existing data – and the resulting rewrite time penalties are so great as to make it much more likely that a RAID rebuild will fail.
I'm not sure that your budget is realistic for the type of storage box you say that you want.
As data points,
If you put those drives in that RAID enclosure and ran it in RAID mirroring mode, that would be $800 for a RAID box that would provide 8 TB of storage. Well outside the "max budget" of "low hundreds."
Keep in mind that while RAID can increase availability, it is NOT a substitute for proper backup. You might be better off getting two 8+ TB hard drives, each in their own enclosure, and using one to back up the other.
I have recycled 2.5" and 3.5" SATA HDDs in my old Firewire enclosures and laptops etc to be used in OWC USB-C Dual Drive Dock.
For example, I have old 1.5 TB or 3 TB Seagate HDDs and one drive is the master and two or more drives are cloned and updated as backups with Carbon Copy Cloner. With CCC I can also backup two 1.5 TB drives to one 3 TB drive as folders, for example.
With Samsung 860/870 EVO SSDs sustained read/write speeds are about 550 MB/s which is enough for me.
To put it in context - this FireWire connected RAID box cost me about $30 on EBay! I populated it with 4x HDD in my stock.
I am not totally in ‘the steam age’! All my computers run on SSD hosted OS, and my M1 MBP hopefully keeps me in the AI environment. It is external archive/photo/music storage where size is far more important than speed where there is an issue for me. I thought the OWC Thunderbolt Dock would sort it for me for the immediate future, but this dropping of FireWire support is a blow.
Unfortunately I do not have a friend who is likely to have a Mac on Tahoe. I wonder if I took the RAID box and Dock to an Apple Shop, would they perhaps test it for me?
Looking at available RAID boxes in my price range (ie EBay) they are mostly equipped with either Thunderbolt 2 or USB-3 ports. These both have different connectors to the USB-C on my M1 MBP. It is not clear to me if they simply require a converter cable?
ProfessorVideo wrote:
Looking at available RAID boxes in my price range (ie EBay) they are mostly equipped with either Thunderbolt 2 or USB-3 ports. These both have different connectors to the USB-C on my M1 MBP. It is not clear to me if they simply require a converter cable?
Apple sells a Thunderbolt 3-to-2 adapter for $50. Note that this adapter does not carry power from one side to another; the devices immediately plugged into it on either side must have their own power supplies.
One issue I see here would be drivers. Any RAID box that dates from the Thunderbolt 1 or 2 era would date from an era where drivers consisted of Intel-only kernel extensions. Those will not run on Apple Silicon Macs such as your M1 MBP, and might not even run on Intel-based Macs running recent versions of macOS. A question would then be whether the RAID box vendor had written new drivers for current systems, and if so, how long they might continue to support current systems before abandoning support for their old RAID hardware.
USB 3 can run on multiple connectors, including USB-A and USB-C. It's easy to get adapters to convert between USB-A (USB 3) and USB-C (USB 3), and those adapters are cheaper than Apple's TB3-to-2 one. Once again, the question would have to do with driver/software compatibility.
Thanks @MartinR.
ProfessorVideo wrote:
Thanks for all the advice. The RAID box is an old G-Tech G Speed and sadly doesn’t have USB-C, only USB-A other than FireWire 800. I am using it as a photo archive, so speed is not a prime requirement.
It is not a problem that it has USB-A connector instead of USB-C. I am sure that the dock also has USB-A ports, and you can connect the RAID this way. Even if the dock has USB-C ports and the RAID only USB-A, you will only need a simple passive adapter, no problem there. What is relevant is that the ports support USB 3.0 or greater, as USB 2 is darned slow. Note: some docks have both USB 2 and USB 3 ports - if that is the case, make sure to use USB 3.
FireWire support on MacBook Pro M1 with OWC Thunderbolt 3 Dock
