Recommended SSD drives for sessions?

[req06]

Hi All,

Is anyone using SSD drives to run sessions? I had a GTech SSD a few years ago and had an issue with corrupt data, so went back to my trusty buffalo SATA drives.

The problem with these is the fan is pretty noisy and I would like to minimise extra noise where possible.

I'm running the latest maxed out Mac Mini and PT2020.3/Catalina so if anyone can recommend a reliable drive to run sessions from that would be great.

I've had Samsung T5s recommended but would buying a generic enclosure and inserting a Crucial SSD be just as good and allow for expansion?

thanks

Iwan

[Southsidemusic]

All depends on your budget but we been using SSD exclusively for the past 8 years for everything so spinners have no place here anymore. We do use quite a few Samsung WDC Black 2TB in TB enclosures for storage and old updates and installers etc but none in any production chain for years.

Darryl Ramm who knows more about these questions than all of the forum comlectively (He does) put us onto the T5 and T7’s so we have a lot of them and also 980’s and 960’s etc in TB3 chassies for recording drives and they work a treat! If budget is an issue I would get a few T5’s 1TB or better and rec drives if ylu need USB3 drives and then you KNOW whats inside the chassi and Samsung speed and quality right thru for a än insane price

[Sardi]

The question should be who isn’t using SSDs these days.

Stick to Samsung. For ultimate speed, use NVME over TB, but even SATA SSD in a USB3 enclosure will run rings around HDDs. Plus, as you pointed out, no more fan noise.

FYI - GTech don’t make drives, so your failure is either the enclosure that they made or whatever brand they were using for the drive inside it.


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[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Sardi

FYI - GTech don’t make drives, so your failure is either the enclosure that they made or whatever brand they were using for the drive inside it.

G-Tech has been owned by Western Digital since 2012 and before that was owned by Hitachi. So they do and have made the drives used internally, including likely their SSD products, but who knows what exactly was in any past devices. Western Digital has been lagging in SSD technology but they acquired SanDisk who have some interesting capabilities and products and are upping their game. They lack the massive depth that Samsung has in manufacturing and technology, but worth watching. G-Technology for a while were a useful brand for higher performance HDD especially since Western Digital themselves kept packaging their own awful performance green drives as external drives, often while obscuring the drives used/awful performance. But then Western Digital also slapped the G-Technology brand on low performance HDD products.... they have pretty much helped make G-Technology a worthless brand.

BTW note the Avid back story with G-Technology is mentioned here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-Technology

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by req06

I'm running the latest maxed out Mac Mini and PT2020.3/Catalina so if anyone can recommend a reliable drive to run sessions from that would be great.

Since you seemed to have missed the SSD boat... I will start with the basics. The best location to run your session from is likely the internal super-fast NVMe/PCIe SSD inside your Mac mini. There is no need for an external/dedicated audio drive. When buying the mini you should have maxed out that SSD as much as you could afford.

But if looking at external drives since you have Thunderbolt 3 capability it may not make a lot of sense to look at SATA or USB drives.

If you don't have space on that internal drive and want NVMe/PCIe type performance then you can look at Thunderbolt 3 based drives that actually internally use a NVMe/PCIe SSD internally (not a SATA drive like lots of cheaper "Thunderbolt 3" drives do). The Samsung X5 is an example of a compact external Thunderbolt 3 that internally uses what is basically a Samsung 970 Evo M.2 NVMe/PCIe SSD... but you pay for the pretty packaging. There are other Thunderbolt 3 options for putting M.2 drives in enclosures from small single drive to more complex multi drive enclosures... many with varying issues... I would keep it simple/single drive unless you had large storage needs.

If you really wanted to go slow USB then I would look at the Samsung T7 (not the goofy model with fingerprint reader). It uses NVMe internally over USB to get a little more performance than its T5 predecessor.

For my money, working with MacBook Pro and being portable I have a collection of T5, T7, and X5. The T5 and T7 are mostly for backups (not archives... they still go to HDD and cloud storage). X5 is for testing/software development reasons, otherwise *everything* I use including sessions/samples runs off the internal 2TB SSD.

[Sardi]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

G-Tech has been owned by Western Digital since 2012 and before that was owned by Hitachi.

I wasn’t aware of that. Cheers for the back story.


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[req06]

Hi all,

Thanks for the advice. The USB3 drives have been fine and absolutley reliable for me so far, prior to that I was using fw800 OWC drives. The main issue is just the noise. The Gtech problem I experienced really put me off SSDs as it just felt unreliable, but I was probably just really unlucky.

I will look into all of your suggestions and hope for some black friday deals.

[albee1952]

Indeed, Samsung and OWC are the usual 2 I recommend, with the exception being the Samsung QVO drives. I have had problems with that series(EVO and PRO are rock solid)

[Darryl Ramm]

Dave not sure what problems you had with the QVO exactly but I also would just not recommend them. The quad level NAND was maybe supposed to drive larger drives to lower price points vs three level (TLC) NAND but with degraded performance (especially sustained write performance) and decreased wear life (that one I doubt will impact most DAW users).But the economics never really happened, or have not yet. If say quad level NAND could drive 4TB and above drives to significantly lower prices vs TLC then it might be interesting for large sample libraries. The 8TB 870 QVO is maybe interesting if people really want that capacity... it fills a hole in the market now, but why not use 2X 4TB 860 EVO? And I expect M.2 NVMe drive capacity to catch up... and M.2 is going through a transition to PCIe 4 so lots of games going on there with product strategy and pricing.

Samsung is working a dying line here with SATA only quad level devices... for most new spend on large SSDs I would only look at NVMe drives. So with not great sustained performance, not stunningly cheaper than TLC and SATA only, and some seeming teething bugs (in the 860 QVO?).... outside of that 8TB drive this product line just seems uninteresting. As is often the case Anandtech had great reviews of the QVO 860 and 870. One of the few review sites that knows what they are talking about with SSDs.

BTW Micron and Sandisk/Western Digital are the other SSD vendors I tend to keep a look out for. But the details of what exact drives matter. OWC is somebody I look at if they have a specific Mac internal drive they can offer that is compatible. Otherwise there are usually better choices available in the general market.