[ejs]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I think that is a great approach. And you can focus on setting up backup/archives. And I do this myself on a 2TB internal SSD.. including because I don't want to have to deal with the hassle of external drives and cables most of the time.

Darryl, this is all extremely helpful and very much appreciated. Thank you.

If the drives are working well now I would use them amongst a set of drives for backups, maybe a bit too small to clone to but use them for session and other user file backups.

Seagate Barracuda used to be well regarded drives. But they ranked low in reliability testing by Backblaze. And Seagate shot themselves in the foot with more recent Rosewood drive reliability. I sure would avoid those. They are used in some LaCie products (LaCie is owned by Seagate). Overall personally I avoid Seagate products, the company seems to have lost its way.

But if your SATA drive enclosure can take a 3.5" drive I would stick a WD Black drive in it.

They can take 3.5” SATA but they are Firewire/USB 2. The WD Black is $177 but the G-Drive only $125 7200rpm and USB 3. Is there any reason you can think not to get that instead?

If you are only using 1TB then sure a 2TB drive to clone to with CCC will work fine. CCC can make incremental clones which you should use, so it will slowly fill up the drive you are clinging to saving copies of files even after you delete them off the source drive.. but you can manage how it does that.

I don't know why they recommend those drives, I have no experience with them, and I might pay attention to them if Anadtech or others did a detailed review and test. I like Samsung SSDs for the reasons mentioned, but they are not the only choice. The equivalent drive I usually recommend is the Samsung T5. 2TB for $300. They are tiny but basically the guts of the similar Samsung 2.5" SATA SSD.

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-T5-Po...073H4GPLQ?th=1

This gets you the benefit of faster than SATA HDD backup to a SATA based SSD, which might have write performance in the ~400MB/sec range.

But that is a lot slower than the internal PCIe/NVMe SSD in your Mac... so if in the case of a internal drive fail, you could boot off the T5 (or U32 Shadow) type drive.. and might be able to run OK, you also might not because it's a factor of several times slower than the internal SSD.

That's what is nice about something like the Samsung X5. (~$700 for 2TB)... not only is it faster to clone to (but not as fast as raw drive speed imples) but if you have a failure and boot off that external drive it *is* as fast as your internal drive and you should be able to continue to run sessions and sampel off that without needing to restore to your internal drive (which you may not want to or many not be able to if it fails... which OK is a longer shot... the most likely reason to actually need to use a backup today is human/finger mistakes).

But just doing CCC clone to a HDD will work fine to let you restore from... but you really won't' be able to just reboot off one of those clones and run your sessions.

If you have never done this try it all out. Make a CCC clone to a drive. Reboot your Mac, hold down the option key while it boots up and select the clone drive and boot that. It's a great way to recover/get working again.

So would you say 2TB is minimum capacity for Boot Clone Drive. Are there any external SSD that go above 2TB?

This is getting expensive

Yes it can. But you have a spectrum available to you of cloning to low cost ~$100 2.5" HDD (+enclosure costs) up to drives like the X5. And mix up several ways. say a X5 for very fast recovery potential, and other stuff on cheap HDD just in case.

And while cloning your boot drive will also backup your session, that's the area where I think you want to do more. I like to create a zip of tar file of an entire session (making sure all the assets are in the session audio folder) and manually backup/archive those. Copy to cloud storage, put on other external drives, burn a DVD-ROM, backup with time machine if you want, copy to NAS storage... whatever, just multiple copies in multiple separate places and make sure you can restore the sessions elsewhere and they really work. Don't lose your work.

So here’s my plan to spend $1,125. What do you think? And thank you very much for all the guidance.

1. Use the Mac mini for both audio record/playback and samples for now. Dedicated sample drive if/when that becomes necessary (Samsung X5 1TB)
2. ($700) Buy 2TB Samsung X5 make incremental clones with CCC - boot drive clone
3. ($300) Buy 2TB Samsung T5 as 2nd Boot Clone Backup
4. ($125) Buy 4TB G-Technology G-DRIVE USB G1 USB 3.0 Hard Drive for Time Machine
5. Put session folders in Dropbox to back up to cloud
6. Use external drives I already own to make third copy backup/archives