Almost zero work on Thorium Remix was completed since my last post.
However, the video above uses narration captured during my hardware woes, and edited during a couple days of stability. Maybe the first 10 minutes are of interest:
The narration sounds better. This is me finally talking-and-listening iteratively instead of only hearing my voice once I try edit with it. [See attachment at bottom for photo of audio capture using 2009 MacBook and ZoomH4n.]
Fixed and broke random visuals. I was only editing for audio, and didn't get as far as repairing visuals.
So the video isn't a big deal, but it gives me an excuse to deliver another status update.
RETURNED THE DROBO
It ran very, very hot. I was not aware of this until after I'd copied all my work onto the thing, shut it down, and went to move it. The drives were cooking, and it is due to a physical design flaw that impedes airflow past high-capacity drives.
6TB NAS drives do not have the indents at the bottom seen on most 3.5" drives. It appears Drobo 5D counts on those indents for airflow. There was no airflow when it was packed with 5x 6TB drives.
None of the Drobo reviews I'd read mentioned this. Presumably because 6TB drives were not a thing when the reviews were written, back when Drobo 5D was released.
USING MY EXISTING MEDIASONIC
I returned the 6TB drives, and am now working with 8TB NAS drives... 8 of them. 4x for storage and 4x for a nightly batch-driven mirror. Each set of 4 is a RAID0-Span.
So it isn't the world's most efficient way of providing RAID redundancy. It is about as brute-force as it gets. But it works out to about the same cost as the hotter (& slower) Drobo.
You would think the RAID5 striping in the Drobo would be faster, but no. It just isn't. RAID0-Span in the MediaSonic ProRAID performs better and can also support mix & match drives. Expanding storage isn't as seamless as predicted by Drobo, but 4x 8TB = 32TB so whatever.
(And I've still got my existing other RAID for off-site backup. So don't anyone think I'm just RAID0-Spanning it as "backup".)
Sorry I don't have any good news. But things are safe. I've got multiple backups and I'm just copying onto a 4x 8TB Span so I can get editing again. Rendering this video out for YouTube was something I could do while 20TB copied across RAIDs on our house PC.