External Drive Advice

[jack s.]

I somewhat recently bought a new Mac Pro running El Capitan and Pro Tools 12.4. I'm still running my old Lacie 7200 drive on USB 2.0. Will I have any increase in performance if I get a thunderbolt external drive, or use one of the firewire 800 ports on the back of it and get a cable that will hook into one of the thunderbolt ports on the Mac Pro? I am getting error messages saying that my computer can't get audio fast enough from the drive sometimes. Any info would be appreciated. Thanks!

[Darryl Ramm]

What type of sessions are you running? # total number of tracks at what sample rate? How many plugins/what types? (to get an idea of overall scale?)

Generally forget slow old HDD, get an SSD.

Just because a box says "Thunderbolt" on it tells you nothing about the performance. A "Thunderbolt" drive can have anything inside it from a crappy 4,800 rpm HDD up to blazingly fast PCIe/NVMe SSDs.

You can't use Firewire ports on the back of your drive to run anything else. You can however connect to thet drive via an Apple Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter, and that will be faster than the USB2 connection. Not sure what exact drive you have or it's performance, but either way it's a slow old HDD, so why bother.

USB 3 if a god option for lower cost/consumer SSDs based on SATA drive technology. Like a Samsung T3. Excellent bang for the $. See Newegg for good pricing.

Thunderbolt for faster SSD. Or if you want multiple SATA SSDs in a single enclosure. High end performance is... PCIe based SSD and are willing to spend $1k or more (e.g. Lacie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2). But in general now is a bad time to spend larger amounts of money of high-end Thunderbolt storage. That market has lacked innovation for a while and likely waiting on Apple to get off it's ass and ship Thunderbolt 3, and then we'll likely see a bunch of Thunderbolt 3 storage, and that makes much more sense for modern PCIe SSDs (Thunderbolt is a bit of a storage performance embarrassment... a single tiny $300 consumer PCIe/NVMe M.2 drive can exceed the speed of Thunderbolt 2).

[DJ Hellfire]

Make sure the drive isn't close to being full. Also, since you're on Pro Tools 12, use the disk cache feature which will load your session into ram and not have not run it off the hard drive.

If it were me, I'd get a thunderbolt drive personally, or at least USB 3. Sucks that you can only run external drives with the new Mac Pro.

[c-tone]

I recommend getting a 7200 RPM USB3 drive and trying that first. They are relatively cheap, and if it isn't quite fast enough, you can still use it for a pretty fast backup drive, and then try the other (more expensive) options Darryl listed above.

[jack s.]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

What type of sessions are you running? # total number of tracks at what sample rate? How many plugins/what types? (to get an idea of overall scale?)

Generally forget slow old HDD, get an SSD.

Just because a box says "Thunderbolt" on it tells you nothing about the performance. A "Thunderbolt" drive can have anything inside it from a crappy 4,800 rpm HDD up to blazingly fast PCIe/NVMe SSDs.

You can't use Firewire ports on the back of your drive to run anything else. You can however connect to thet drive via an Apple Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter, and that will be faster than the USB2 connection. Not sure what exact drive you have or it's performance, but either way it's a slow old HDD, so why bother.

USB 3 if a god option for lower cost/consumer SSDs based on SATA drive technology. Like a Samsung T3. Excellent bang for the $. See Newegg for good pricing.

Thunderbolt for faster SSD. Or if you want multiple SATA SSDs in a single enclosure. High end performance is... PCIe based SSD and are willing to spend $1k or more (e.g. Lacie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2). But in general now is a bad time to spend larger amounts of money of high-end Thunderbolt storage. That market has lacked innovation for a while and likely waiting on Apple to get off it's ass and ship Thunderbolt 3, and then we'll likely see a bunch of Thunderbolt 3 storage, and that makes much more sense for modern PCIe SSDs (Thunderbolt is a bit of a storage performance embarrassment... a single tiny $300 consumer PCIe/NVMe M.2 drive can exceed the speed of Thunderbolt 2).

I'm running maybe 40 tracks max usually at 48k/24bit. I'm running the stock avid plugs and virtual instruments as well as Superior Drummer 2. There is lots of room on my old drive still. I don't want to spend a ton of money....maybe a couple hundred bucks max.

[Bob Olhsson]

I really love my G-Drive ev USB3 drive.

It's Mac format but my Pro Tools PC reads and writes to it really really fast so I can move stuff between Mac and PC. I'm told Thunderbolt would be no faster unless I was using a RAID array or an SSD.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by jack s.

I'm running maybe 40 tracks max usually at 48k/24bit. I'm running the stock avid plugs and virtual instruments as well as Superior Drummer 2. There is lots of room on my old drive still. I don't want to spend a ton of money....maybe a couple hundred bucks max.

OK that certainly does not need a superfast PCIe SSD. and to keep cost down I would get the Samsung T3 SSD. It really is not much more than a good external HDD. HDD really belong in museums, and for backup/archive purposes. It is just not worth the risk having performance glitches not to use SSDs fir audio/session drives.

$207 for 500 GB. It comes formatted EX-FAT, reformat it as Mac OS Extended Journaled/HFS+ before you use it.

You can use your current drive for backups... But even for that I would use a FireWire adapter, USB 2 is awfully slowwwwww....

[Bob Olhsson]

USB2 is actually pretty fast but most interfaces are USB1.

[Extreme Mixing]

It embarrasses me to say this, but I KNOW from first hand expereince on my laptop, that you can run 60 or so tracks off of an $80 2TB USB3 Seagate drive with 5400rpm spinner inside! Not the best way to go, but 40 tracks will probably be fine. If you want more power, get the SSD for $200. USB 3 is considerably faster than firewire.

Steve

[ronwasserman]

Samsung T1's. I run a bunch of them. Super fast small and powered by USB3. They changed to T3's now. Amazing little drives.