[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by ejs

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


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?

I would look and try to see what exact drive is installed in any external drive, especially if somebody has reviewed it. But start with if they don't clearly spec 7,200 RPM then definitely avoid it, just so slow they are painful. I have long used G-Technology drives, and for example I have several 1TB G-Drive eV RaW drives (and many older drives), but made sure to get the 7,200 rpm version, then available only in 1Tb size.

I just don't have anything intelligent to say about the latest high density external drives. I don't use them. I wish there were better technical reviews and long term tests done with them but they are such cheap commodities nowadays. And I would like to see stats on SMR vs CMR drive reliability, and even knowing the WD Black uses SMR in some higher density drives I've not heard of that causing reliability issues... but be paranoid, use a couple of different model drives.

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

Sure, but few units including the U32 Shadow 4TB. Which is maybe why Bombich recommends them? But this is just outside current sweetspots so give it a little time. Most folks today that wanted a lot of external SSD are just going to use multiple drives or for more demanding work stick multiple M.2 drives in an external Thunderbolt chassis... that can be compelling for high end used today, but cooling fans and power supplies make it less compelling with a MacBook Pro. Another option is to take a SSD Sata drive and put in your own enclosure, but I like the compact little T5 and similar units from other vendors, many of those vendors have 4TB 2.5" SATA drives today.. just a matter of time until they end up in a USB version. I expect the reasons there is all market demand and cost, not technology.

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

Keep you session on the internal SSD not in a dropbox folder. If you put the actual session you run in a Dropbox folder that is likely to completely mess you up. You don't want Dropbox trying to copy stuff while Pro Tools is writing it to disk. When you want to make an archive of your sessions, tar or zip up the session folder and give it a name you can keep track of and copy that tar or zip file to an external drive and also drag and drop onto a cloud service (like into your Dropbox folder). In my case I have a script that does this and uses a utility that uses a simple Google Cloud API to copy stuff there. Check that stuff really gets what you expect and can download and use (e.g. say check it shows up correctly using the Dropbox web UI and download that to a different location, ideally on a different computer, untar/unzip and test run the session).

6. Use external drives I already own to make third copy backup/archives

I think you are on the right track. I would probably grab the X5 and use your current HDDs, or maybe buy a cheap HDD and start doing clones and archive backups... and see how it goes and then decide what else to purchase. If you are doing this well you will soon end up with a decent number of HDD and SSDs stored away safe, nicely labeled, etc. It's so worrying to see folks that don't back up stuff and lose theirs or other's work... and as Dave says, it will happen.

And a nice thing about the X5 with APFS is you may have enough space on a 2TB one to throw a APFS test container on there and test out your future OS upgrades without any risk to your internal drive setup. That's exactly what I'm doing with an X5 now.