Time for New External Hard Drives...

[Sparky1]

Hi there.


So my external hard drives (5) have started acting up.


One of the problems is I keep getting these "magic ID" errors.


These drives are between 5 and 10 years old.



They are all around 500GB in size, 7200 RPM and are connected using firewire...


I recently purchased a Samsung T5 SSD - just to store some additional data on.


It seems to work well and is a fraction of the size of my other external hard drives - which are around the same storage size.


I haven't run any Pro Tools projects off of this (it's connected using USB into a late 2013 Macbook Pro running Sierra)


Is this a drive system I should consider moving forward?


Thinking I would replace all my external drives with 2 larger Samsung SSD's.


Thanks,


Sparky

[Darryl Ramm]

13” or 15” Retina MBP? EMC # would be even clearer.

The T5 would be a good choice. You only have Gbit/s USB 3 and the T5 work up to 10 Gbit/s USB 3.1 Gen 2 but in reality that won’t lose too much performance.

Other options are:

Cracking open the Mac and upgrading the internal SSD, that is PCIe 2 x 2 lane so not as fast as modern PCIe 3 x 4 lane SSD. If it was the later I would be much more inclined to do that.. and run sessions off that internal drive. I am not sure if the slot is limited to PCIe 2 x 2 lane or is actually 4 lane. If you are OK on working on a Retina MBP or paying somebody to then that might be worth doing more research on.

Using a Thunderbolt 1 or 2 SSD. Limited choices there but if you look around you could find a faster drive than even the current internal SSD. But maybe not worth the hassle over just using a T5.

[Sparky1]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

13” or 15” Retina MBP? EMC # would be even clearer.

Sorry, it's a 15" Retina MBP


Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro11,3
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 16 GB
Boot ROM Version: 149.0.0.0.0
SMC Version (system): 2.19f12


Thanks,


Sparky

[Sparky1]

It's really quite amazing how small these functional external drives are getting...


Sparky

[Darryl Ramm]

So this may be going down a rat hole but I would at least consider the internal SSD upgrade, especially with a 2TB SSD if that would let me avoid needing any external drives connected, and if I wanted to keep that MBP working for a few more years... it's a nice computer, supports Mojave, has 16GB (so pretty usable, but unfortunately soldered to the motherboard and not upgradeable). The only reason I'd stop spending money on it is if you are running out of memory or CPU. Cracking open a MBP Retina is non-trivial and maybe something to have a repair center do.

The SSD inside your MBP Retina is a PCIe 2 x 2 lane card. But the motherboard actually provides PCIe 2 x 4 lane. Which might make me want to find a nice replacement 2 x 4 SSD that fits there. Even though not a PCIe 3 card these can be quite capable of running sessions etc. off the system/boot drive, especially with disk cache.

It's an Apple proprietary SSD card interface, looks something like M.2 but it's not. But OWC and others sells compatible cards up to 2GB AFAIK. OWC claim performance specs that are a bit more than PCIe 2 x 2 lane for those cards so I'd like to see exactly what they are, they might be 4 lane cards, but I'm always a bit dubious of OWC storage marketing claims. Unfortunately the really good third party SSD review sites don't benchmark OWC drives. But even then the performance is likely to be significantly better than a T5 (like maybe 3-4 times better sustained bandwidth, less difference on IO rates).

Some more details at https://beetstech.com/blog/apple-pro...s-and-upgrades

And on the other hand the T5 is a nice little drive. I have several of them.

[hengus]

I use a drobo 5d thunderbolt. It works really well. I have an ssd excellerator installed. You can then use whatever optical drives you want with 5 bays. I have mine set up as a raid mirror so dont have to worry about backups.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by hengus

I use a drobo 5d thunderbolt. It works really well. I have an ssd excellerator installed. You can then use whatever optical drives you want with 5 bays. I have mine set up as a raid mirror so dont have to worry about backups.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

RAID mirror should never mean you don't worry about backups. The mirror only protects you from drive failure. It does not protect you from finger mistakes or software bugs, all more likely causes of data loss on personal computers than drive failure. And it does not protect you from failure of the drobo RAID hardware or software. And I've seen whole RAID boxes go down with spectacular (software) failures. And I'd be very careful of being locked into Drobo or any other systems proprietary RAID. Software based RAID with external drives or JBOD enclosures at least let you recover drives in more flexible scenarios.

[Sparky1]

Darryl Ramm - you have some serious knowledge - thanks for sharing it with me/us.


Our local Best Buy had a great deal on T5 1TB drives. So I bought 2 of those and will condense everything onto one of those drives and use the other as a backup for the first one.


Appreciate the time and effort!


Sparky