External SSD Recommendation

[paul_g]

Hi forum members, long time member here. I had an older LaCie drive for my old ProTools Rig. I'm rebuilding a new Thunderbolt 3 rig and I'm wondering how much I/O do I need?

New LaCie 1TIB SSD 2xxx W/R = $400.00; or I can go Samsung 970EVO with an external enclosure for $300.00. I'm hesitating on the external enclosure because it's cooled and I don't know how loud the fan is.



While I realize more IOPS are better, I know I'm going to be leaving some on the floor, depending on cost of Thunderbolt 3 cable, etc.. I also know I may not need 2xxx or 3xxx W/R speeds since a 7200 RPM drive did the trick for years.

Any suggestions?

[Darryl Ramm]

What new Mac or other computer are you planning to connect this drive to?

With current Macs the best drive to put your sessions on is likely the internal boot/system drive. Easy, no cables to dick around with or accidentally unplug (a design issue with Thunderbolt 3/USB-C cables) etc. NVMe SSDs are so fast the old rules about needing a dedicated session/audio drive no longer apply. Put samples there as well. So the best advice I can give is max out the Mac internal PCIe SSD as much as you can afford. But with disk cache (which you still should be using and size your RAM to fit the sessions) you can run Pro Tools sessions on just about any slow drive. Disk cache and an NVMe drive will help large sessions load very quickly and make saving sessions fast, likely the times you will notice that if you have disk cache enabled. Beyond that NVMe/PCIe drives are great for fast boots and fast backups (if backing up to another NVMe SSD... and that may make sense but longer term archives are likely better off on good HDDs).

I have no idea what exact model Lacie you are looking at.... you could have just included a link. Laice pfffft... they are owned by Seagate and their current awful reputation for quality in consumer HDD just does not endear them to me. They also are just not a SSD player in anything like the league of Samsung (global leader) or even Western Digital (who now own Sandisk and others). Seagate did purchase part of Toshiba's NAND business, but have been asleep and are so late to the SSD party. Samsung is the largest manufacturer in the world, develops their own controllers, own firmware and can fix any problems in house. Ant they've sure screwed up before, but they fix stuff. What can Lacie/Seagate do when there is a problem? In third party firmware or third party controllers they likely use? And these are complex beasts, running very sophisticated firmware.

Samsung is the obvious, but not the only choice, WD is making nice M.2 drives as are others. There is no need anymore to look for a boutique brand like Glyph, G-Tech, OWC, or Laice, rather the reverse, you want a volume manufacturer not a repackager/reseller.

Not all thunderbolt 3 M.2 enclosures have fans, there is a very wide choice. Including some multi-drive encloses you should avoid unless really needed.... many only give a subset of the performance to each drive, regardless if only one drive is used. If you hammer these M.2 drives they will get hot and throttle and have a somewhat reduced life (but drive wear is really not an issue for typical DAW workloads even on these consumer SSDs).

[Marsdy]

Originally Posted by paul_g

Hi forum members, long time member here. I had an older LaCie drive for my old ProTools Rig. I'm rebuilding a new Thunderbolt 3 rig and I'm wondering how much I/O do I need?

New LaCie 1TIB SSD 2xxx W/R = $400.00; or I can go Samsung 970EVO with an external enclosure for $300.00. I'm hesitating on the external enclosure because it's cooled and I don't know how loud the fan is.

While I realize more IOPS are better, I know I'm going to be leaving some on the floor, depending on cost of Thunderbolt 3 cable, etc.. I also know I may not need 2xxx or 3xxx W/R speeds since a 7200 RPM drive did the trick for years.

Any suggestions?

Further to what Darryl said, you won’t get super high R/W speeds with Thunderbolt3/USB-C anyway. I have a Samsung 960EVO m.2 in a passively cooled USB-C external box for daily backups and it averages around 1000Mb/s (this is before any thermal throttling.) So the Samsung is kind of overkill in that you’re not going to get anything like it’s peak performance in an external TB3/USB-C box. They also run quite hot compared to other brands.

The Samsungs are amazing on an internal PCIe m.2 adapter, ridiculously fast, but for an external enclosure, the Sabrent drives are great and generate a lot less heat. They are plenty fast enough for an audio drive

[paul_g]

Hi Darryl and Marsdy,


That is exactly the information I was looking for! Perfect! I too had questioned the need for an external audio drive, given that the modern iMac's etc, come with SSD's. They should easily be able to handle the workload, but like I said, it's been a while and I was going by the old best-practice. This is perfect and solves other issues of needing more TB3 ports.


RE What mac: I was thinking of a mid-2020 iMac, or just wait until all the vendors support the ARM.



This answers my questions, thank you.

[Marsdy]

Originally Posted by paul_g

Hi Darryl and Marsdy,


That is exactly the information I was looking for! Perfect! I too had questioned the need for an external audio drive, given that the modern iMac's etc, come with SSD's. They should easily be able to handle the workload, but like I said, it's been a while and I was going by the old best-practice. This is perfect and solves other issues of needing more TB3 ports.


RE What mac: I was thinking of a mid-2020 iMac, or just wait until all the vendors support the ARM.


This answers my questions, thank you.

At this point I would certainly hold off for an Apple silicon iMac. Early signs are ARM is an order of magnitude faster than Intel.