External Hard Drive Recommendations PLZ

[Adupr]

Hey gents, just purchased a new i7 Mac mini and from a Cheesegrater 3.33 with 4 bay internal drives. What is a good route for the price to go for external drives for the Mac mini. Will be to record to, sample libraries, and storage.

Go multiple drive bay and which one?
Or just external drives and which?
thunderbolt, usb-c ??????

I'm really behind the curve on this one so any help would be great.

My old system had the main drive and then 3 2tb drives. Would like to go more space but less drives.

[Ryan Young]

I've actually been running a sizable session, with all audio and video, off of a LaCie USB-C SSD. I'm amazed. I have a USB-C PCIe card in my 2010 12 core cheesegrater.

[Darryl Ramm]

You are not telling us very critical pieces of information, like the size of your sample libraries (or maybe you did and I missed it first look).

[edit: I was assuming here... you were after one drive...]

If you want to put samples and sessions on the same external drive... go PCIe/NVMe SSD (that an SSD is "Thunderbolt" does not guarantee anything useful, many are only slow SATA drives inside, but all current PCIe/NVMe external drives will be Thunderbolt 3).

...But be careful if you are wanting to move that drive to other Macs.. they will need Thunderbolt 3 support. And you will need at least two other drives to back that SSD up to... HDD may be great for that. And if you have lots of samples you now have made that SSD more expensive than other options. So might be better to keep samples on a separate drive.

Also why don't you run the sessions off the Mac Mini internal PCIe/NVMe SSD and just run samples off the external drive. You might also use that drive as one of the places you keep session copies/backups.

My standard recommendation for a NVMe/PCIe external SSD is a ... Samsung X5. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GBTY82P...ing=UTF8&psc=1

[Darryl Ramm]

It's hard to guess how much performance you want and how much you are willing to pay. but at those sizes I'd probably go with a 4TB SATA SSD (like this https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Inch-.../dp/B07864XY8B) for samples. Add another if you need more space. I'd run sessions off the much faster internal PCIe/NVMe SSD.

The Akitio Thunder3 Quad Mini is an enclosure option, lots of nice stuff, but like many of these boxes, the internal PCIe to SATA III chipset is not ideal and slows things down from what a SATA III SSD can do (about a 20% loss per drive). If you wanted to use that enclosure you might be better off with more smaller SSDs. Don't RAID/stripe the drives (and make stuff more error prone/likely to fail). Just use them as JBOD.

You might be better off if other folks here can suggest what enclosures they are using. I've given up on SATA except for backup, and i don't have huge sample libraries (~1.5TB) so my world now is all internal PCIe/NVMe and some external X5 drives.

Pay attention to what Thunderbolt devices you get and if they have two ports so you can daisy chain stuff you need.

If you wanted to go high-end you can look at external Thunderbolt to PCIe chassis with M.2 cards inside them. Including populating on a card like this.. https://www.sonnettech.com/product/m...pcie-card.html into an external chassis. but you only get 1/4 the card performance vs. installing in a real PCIe 3 x 16 lane slot. And with those (heat generating under lots of load) M.2 PCIe/NVMe drives and an external chassis things can get loud.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

It's hard to guess how much performance you want and how much you are willing to pay. but at those sizes I'd probably go with a 4TB SATA SSD (like this https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Inch-.../dp/B07864XY8B) for samples. Add another if you need more space. I'd run sessions off the much faster internal PCIe/NVMe SSD.

Here's something interesting with that particular drive: if you get two 2 TB drives same type it's only about $500 total versus the $580. And it seems like everyone prices these Samsungs the same. Been looking at getting them from B&H - same price. Local Best Buy - same price.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by musicman691

Here's something interesting with that particular drive: if you get two 2 TB drives same type it's only about $500 total versus the $580. And it seems like everyone prices these Samsungs the same. Been looking at getting them from B&H - same price. Local Best Buy - same price.

Good point, and if you have slots in a disk enclosure it may be better to go with more SATA SSDs and potentially more overall performance, especially if like the Akitio one their individual SATA performance takes a hit.. well up until the point that things get too much more complex. One thing I stay away from is RAID'ing up the drives and reducing reliability (including by making the thing more complex to manage and more finger error prone.).