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  #11  
Old 12-10-2020, 11:27 AM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

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Originally Posted by JFreak View Post
APFS cannot beat laws of physics, it only allows flexibility in organising your files. Samples need to be on separate physical drive, but it can be slower USB3-connected drive if you don't have so many/large libraries. Though you do not need to do this until you face performance problems.
Samples do not need to be on separate drives, this is nonsense to claim to be a "rule". Many of us have been operating sessions and samples on PCIe/NVMe based SSDs for years.

The starting point for most users on a modern Mac should likely be to assume *everything* will be on the internal NVMe SSD. If sample libraries don't fit there then sure put them elsewhere, but it is disk space, not performance or any "rule" that will typically determine that.

Last edited by Darryl Ramm; 12-10-2020 at 11:50 AM.
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  #12  
Old 12-10-2020, 11:50 AM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

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Originally Posted by hirundos View Post
Since I want something reliable for backup/archive, HDD should be the way to go, right? If I don't plan to use it as an audio drive, do I need the 7200RPM? I have that currently and I assume they run louder and hotter than 5400RPM. Though if I plan to have a bootable backup, maybe 7200RPM is better... I think unmounting when not backing up will solve the "I can't stand to listen to the platters spinning and writing" problem...or I will have to create a sound-proofed box for it, haha. I have a tiny office space!
The question is not quite as simple as that. You should be using significantly more than one backup drive, and you need to think about what the objectives are, how you will recover stuff and time/hassle for you to do a recovery--of the entire system or sessions or individual files.

So say for example you want to quickly recover from a damaged boot drive or some software upgrade disaster. A nice way to do that is just to have a clone of the entire boot drive on a fast external Thunderbolt 3 NVMe/PCIe drive... then a full recovery is just the time it takes to boot off that drive... and you run off it until you sort stuff out later, this also applies to a disaster like total failure or theft of the computer where you might be able to repurpose/borrow/rent another Mac or maybe pick one up quickly at the apple store. You likely can't boot and run everything off a HDD if you cloned to that. And you need more than one of these drives to be safe. But if recovery time is not an issue and you can say lose part of a day to a week (say to reformat the internal drive and clone stuff back or get the Mac internal drive repaired by apple) then sure you could clone to a HDD.

For me I want high performance bootable clones, where the sessions might get cloned as well, and I especially want them made prior to any software changes. but I also want lots of separate backup and archives (ie for long term storage) of sessions and documents etc. and for this especially for long term storage using combinations of HDD and cloud storage would be my choice. But 7200 rpm, just because 4,800 rpm is so slow its painful. you can also do things like manually update only sessions on existing whole drive clines, but the more complex you make stuff to do the higher the chance of finger problems.
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  #13  
Old 12-10-2020, 12:23 PM
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JFreak JFreak is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

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Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm View Post
Samples do not need to be on separate drives, this is nonsense to claim to be a "rule". Many of us have been operating sessions and samples on PCIe/NVMe based SSDs for years.

The starting point for most users on a modern Mac should likely be to assume *everything* will be on the internal NVMe SSD. If sample libraries don't fit there then sure put them elsewhere, but it is disk space, not performance or any "rule" that will typically determine that.
Which part of "you do not need to do this until you face peformance problems" you missed?
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  #14  
Old 12-10-2020, 12:25 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

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Which part of "you do not need to do this until you face peformance problems" you missed?
You wrote "The "rule" of today is keep your sample libraries on separate drive(s)." which is simply wrong.
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  #15  
Old 12-10-2020, 12:26 PM
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

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You wrote "The "rule" of today is keep your sample libraries on separate drive(s)." which is simply wrong.
It is just as wrong as the old "rule" of yesteryear to keep your session files on separate drive(s). If you had 10k or 15k rpm system drive, it could server your session very well. Just tried to simplify things for people who are concerned about these "rules".
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  #16  
Old 12-10-2020, 04:32 PM
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albee1952 albee1952 is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

Just keep in mind that putting everything on a single drive is likely to fill it up fairly quickly, depending on how many(and how big) sessions you have, and how many sample libraries you have(my partner's rig has a solid 6TB of space used for sample libraries).
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  #17  
Old 12-10-2020, 09:12 PM
TimothyJohn TimothyJohn is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

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Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm View Post
Samples do not need to be on separate drives, this is nonsense to claim to be a "rule". Many of us have been operating sessions and samples on PCIe/NVMe based SSDs for years.

The starting point for most users on a modern Mac should likely be to assume *everything* will be on the internal NVMe SSD. If sample libraries don't fit there then sure put them elsewhere, but it is disk space, not performance or any "rule" that will typically determine that.
I ordered the M1 Air, 8/8, 16gb RAM, 512gb SSD for my Wife. I ordered the same for me, 1TB SSD. When my daughter goes to college next year, Lord willing, she will get this one, and I will get the second gen M processor Air or MacBook Pro. But you all bring up an excellent point. I acquired two Samsung T7's as backups. The read/write over T3 is supposed to be about 1 gb/sec. I will get a 2TB PCIe 3.0/NVMe. This one. Read write is 2gb/sec over T3.

But this raises an interesting question. Given the fact that SSD's can only be written to a finite number of times; and we record, edit, alter and master music--even video; AND given the fact that these SSD's are NOT user replaceable; wouldn't it make sense to record/edit/mix/master sessions on external drives? Considering the high speed and dropping cost of external SSD's? My understanding is that even a 2TB drive needs a certain percentage free. The more free space there is to work with, the better it is for the health and life of the drive. SOME people out there suggest using the internal SSD for OS and apps ONLY. And even others suggest loading EVERYTHING onto an external as a boot drive, even the OS; and leave the internal SSD untouched. And when it's time to upgrade and sell, you are providing the next owner with a virtually brand new internal SSD.

I find this sort of discussion intriguing. The speed and cost of these newer external SSD's enables us to have conversations like this...

Thanks!!

Last edited by TimothyJohn; 12-10-2020 at 09:14 PM. Reason: omission
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  #18  
Old 12-10-2020, 09:32 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

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Originally Posted by TimothyJohn View Post
I ordered the M1 Air, 8/8, 16gb RAM, 512gb SSD for my Wife. I ordered the same for me, 1TB SSD. When my daughter goes to college next year, Lord willing, she will get this one, and I will get the second gen M processor Air or MacBook Pro. But you all bring up an excellent point. I acquired two Samsung T7's as backups. The read/write over T3 is supposed to be about 1 gb/sec. I will get a 2TB PCIe 3.0/NVMe. This one. Read write is 2gb/sec over T3.

But this raises an interesting question. Given the fact that SSD's can only be written to a finite number of times; and we record, edit, alter and master music--even video; AND given the fact that these SSD's are NOT user replaceable; wouldn't it make sense to record/edit/mix/master sessions on external drives? Considering the high speed and dropping cost of external SSD's? My understanding is that even a 2TB drive needs a certain percentage free. The more free space there is to work with, the better it is for the health and life of the drive. SOME people out there suggest using the internal SSD for OS and apps ONLY. And even others suggest loading EVERYTHING onto an external as a boot drive, even the OS; and leave the internal SSD untouched. And when it's time to upgrade and sell, you are providing the next owner with a virtually brand new internal SSD.

I find this sort of discussion intriguing. The speed and cost of these newer external SSD's enables us to have conversations like this...

Thanks!!
The expected wear life of the internal SSD should not be an issue with any reasonable use here. The life in typical usage will outlast the computer, and (given the age of many of us on DUC) I expect the life of many users. This is just not something to worry about... what is more worth worrying about is loss of data or corruption though user finger mistakes, or theft of the computer, the building catching fire or falling down etc. Back up and archive your data accordingly.

Many of the people making these crazy claims about SSDs clearly don't understand the fundamentals (I've worked with tech companies that pioneered technology in this space). Here is a good starter explanation on drive wear life (and no you don't need to worry about over-provisioning, the apple drives will be automatically over-provisioned enough for out uses). https://www.compuram.de/blog/en/the-...-to-take-care/

Personally I would put everything if it will fit on the blazingly fast internal PCIe/NVMe SSD drive (I mostly use a MacBook Pro) where possible to avoid external drives and fragile unreliable connections and the ease with which external drives can walk off or be lost especially if you are working mobile with a laptop. Sadly Thunderbolt cables are amongst the worse for cable retention/security. If there is not space then sure stuff goes on an external drive.

To be clear the Samsung T7 is *not* a Thunderbolt drive, it's USB drive with a USB-C connector (the same connector as Thunderbolt). Its a new era of drive that use NVMe over USB vs. most others we talk about that are NVMe/PCIe over Thunderbolt like the Samsung X5... which for different measurements will be several times faster than the T7. I use a mix of X5, T5 and T7 drives and some HDD for my backups. The X5 especially when I'm testing out new macOS versions and want to boot and run off it, it's then so close to the internal drive speed you don't notice any difference. The T7 are fantastic but if you were cloning the internal drive to a T7 and had to boot off it and try to run everything off that clone you may not have the disk performance you expect... but try how well it works for you. And yes the X5 are overpriced, damn you Samsung.

Last edited by Darryl Ramm; 12-10-2020 at 10:23 PM.
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  #19  
Old 12-10-2020, 11:28 PM
TimothyJohn TimothyJohn is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

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Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm View Post
The expected wear life of the internal SSD should not be an issue with any reasonable use here. The life in typical usage will outlast the computer, and (given the age of many of us on DUC) I expect the life of many users. This is just not something to worry about... what is more worth worrying about is loss of data or corruption though user finger mistakes, or theft of the computer, the building catching fire or falling down etc. Back up and archive your data accordingly.

Many of the people making these crazy claims about SSDs clearly don't understand the fundamentals (I've worked with tech companies that pioneered technology in this space). Here is a good starter explanation on drive wear life (and no you don't need to worry about over-provisioning, the apple drives will be automatically over-provisioned enough for out uses). https://www.compuram.de/blog/en/the-...-to-take-care/

The T7's are for backup. It's THIS DRIVE I am planning to use.

Personally I would put everything if it will fit on the blazingly fast internal PCIe/NVMe SSD drive (I mostly use a MacBook Pro) where possible to avoid external drives and fragile unreliable connections and the ease with which external drives can walk off or be lost especially if you are working mobile with a laptop. Sadly Thunderbolt cables are amongst the worse for cable retention/security. If there is not space then sure stuff goes on an external drive.

To be clear the Samsung T7 is *not* a Thunderbolt drive, it's USB drive with a USB-C connector (the same connector as Thunderbolt). Its a new era of drive that use NVMe over USB vs. most others we talk about that are NVMe/PCIe over Thunderbolt like the Samsung X5... which for different measurements will be several times faster than the T7. I use a mix of X5, T5 and T7 drives and some HDD for my backups. The X5 especially when I'm testing out new macOS versions and want to boot and run off it, it's then so close to the internal drive speed you don't notice any difference. The T7 are fantastic but if you were cloning the internal drive to a T7 and had to boot off it and try to run everything off that clone you may not have the disk performance you expect... but try how well it works for you. And yes the X5 are overpriced, damn you Samsung.

This is the drive I want to use: Fantom Drives eXtreme Thunderbolt 3 NVMe Portable SSD. On B&H, it's currently listed at around $450 for 2TB. And it claims to be T3, but on the spec sheet it says, "1 x Thunderbolt 3 (USB Type-C)". So your advice is to get a 2TB internal, rather than 1Tb internal and 1Tb ext; NO MATTER WHAT the connectors, speed, etc., given the unreliability of the cables and ports themselves? At least that's how I interpret your answer,

Thank you for that. And the link regarding the life span of SSD's. Some are saying 5yrs, ten years, avg use. But for audio professionals, my guess is that we degrade the SSD's faster. PLUS, many are all GAGA over how fast the M1's SSD's are, even with 8gb RAM; because the overflow goes to the SSD, whenever the 8gb is exceeded. But this wears the SSD even more. So for the sake of the SSD, the more RAM the better. Thanks Darryl for your reply. My Air hasn't shipped. My Wife's arrived Monday, and is still in the brown shipping box right in front of me. She wants to wait til Christmas...
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  #20  
Old 12-11-2020, 12:40 AM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

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This is the drive I want to use: Fantom Drives eXtreme Thunderbolt 3 NVMe Portable SSD. On B&H, it's currently listed at around $450 for 2TB. And it claims to be T3, but on the spec sheet it says, "1 x Thunderbolt 3 (USB Type-C)". So your advice is to get a 2TB internal, rather than 1Tb internal and 1Tb ext; NO MATTER WHAT the connectors, speed, etc., given the unreliability of the cables and ports themselves? At least that's how I interpret your answer,
Yes they are Thunderbolt 3, which uses a USB-C *connector* the connector does not mean its USB actually transferring the data. A USB-C connector can run USB, USB-2, USB-3.x, Displayport, or... Thunderbolt, ... they are all different, just using the same connector.

Fantom? Who? what? Some tiny company... what do they actually manufacture? More likely they rebadging stuff, but who knows what? I would not touch any of those with a ten foot pole. I don't know who's NAND they are using or who's controller or firmware. And there products have never been say reviewed on Andtech.com so lacking all their really good review tests/benchmarks. And what can Fantom do when there is a controller firmware bug? How many firmware engineers do they have on staff? Or who's firmware do they use and can they even roll out updates?

Now let me point out the absurdity here, you are worried about drive wear and presumably reliability etc. and you are willing to buy a cheap drive from God knows who? Just no.

SSDs are incredibly complex beasts. Samsung is the largest SSD vendor in the world, the largest NAND manufacturer in the world, they do everything themselves from NAND to controllers to firmware and are able to fix stuff at any level themselves (and do). I would start by lookin at a Samsung X5 or other external NVMe SSDs from major manufacturers or look at putting an M.2 drive in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure. Especially M.2 drives from... again major vendors like... Samsung, Micron, Sandisk. ... or maybe for your needs the T7 is blazingly fast enough, ... I have no idea.


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Thank you for that. And the link regarding the life span of SSD's. Some are saying 5yrs, ten years, avg use. But for audio professionals, my guess is that we degrade the SSD's faster.
That's not true. the data write rates in most audio use is low. You don't need to guess.... the article I linked to showed how to calculate the life... so go do a calculation instead of guessing. Actually get the specs for drives and calculate the life time for the data writes you will do. But it's going to be so long it's a waste of time to worry about. All the discussion on DUC ever about SSDs have been about consumer grade SSDs, nobody in audio I'm aware of uses enterprise grade SSDs aimed at extreme high drive write lives, it's just not needed... the write rates don't get near the use in say enterprise or large cloud servers. If there were wear problems DUC would be full of posts about drive failure and which super expensive enterprise grade SSD is best.... all I hears is *crickets*.

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PLUS, many are all GAGA over how fast the M1's SSD's are, even with 8gb RAM; because the overflow goes to the SSD, whenever the 8gb is exceeded.
You really need to stop confusing yourself with this stuff. The M1 does nothing different than paging memory to the SSD than any Intel based Mac does. And it also does memory compression, just like Intel macs do (another point some people seem confused about). The smaller memory *will* mean you can't run some workloads, it might mean some more stuff pages out to SSD but this is not going to wear out the SSD, it is minuscule wear in the big picture, if the memory pressure is so high the laptop is actively paging in and out, so that it's significant the performance will suck and people just won't be running the apps on the mac. Want to know about another computer that pages memory out to SSD a lot--that is often under significant memory pressure? Many of the hundreds of millions of iPhones... and how many iPhones do you hear about with failing SSDs?

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But this wears the SSD even more. So for the sake of the SSD, the more RAM the better.
No forget the SSD. You don't need to worry about this. You need enough memory to run the apps you need in memory. Stop worrying about stuff, get yourself set up and get going using the computer. (and FWWI I'm probably picking up a M1 MacBook Pro for work stuff but will of course toss PT on it to see).
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