Fanless thunderbolt enclosure?

[rosindabow]

I have a professional home studio. About to move up to the new Mac Studio. All my external hard drives need to be as quiet as they possibly can be. I have looked at some OWC Thunderbolt enclosures but they all have fans. Anyone find any external Thunderbolt drive enclosures that either do not have a fan or are whisper quiet?

[smurfyou]

Hmmph I’ve discussed this at least twice with OWC. I don’t understand why they can’t give us just one audio friendly enclosure.

I’m not an engineer but I wondered if it was the power delivery. Which in a studio environment we don’t need 70W to charge a laptop. But maybe it’s part of the Thunderbolt spec? Not sure.

SATA SSD’s are fine without a fan. But M.2 is becoming standard and they do need good cooling. But a well designed heat sink will work or even a low velocity silent fan if necessary.

The best I’ve found for SATA in the meantime is this https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MEMDC2KIT/

USB3.1 gen2 so fast enough for audio. Bonus points that it can be bus powered so good on the go.

Plenty of discussion here about M.2 enclosures if you search. Cooling is the main factor, a lot of the cheap ones are inadequate. Darryl Ramm usually chimes in with good advice

[JFreak]

I have this.

[sw rec]

Using a Sonnet Thunderbolt to 3 pci-e chassis, 2 adapters with m.2 drives, and a UA OCTO in the 3rd slot. It has a fan in it, but it’s silent.
https://www.sonnetstore.com/collecti...o-express-se3e

[moogboy100]

Im sure you have reasons for your external drives, but sometimes its good to change things up

It's absolutely worth paying for the 4tb or 8tb internal ssd. They are the fastest (and silent) drives you can get (7Gb/s).

I then supplement that with an OWC 4tb Envoy Pro FX Thunderbolt, which is also fanless and knock your socks off fast (2.8Gb/s).

And that's enough for me. 8 to 12 tb of storage operating at speeds I couldn't have dreamed possible just 5 years ago, all fanless and silent and internalized or bus-powered.

[sw rec]

“ Im sure you have reasons for your external drives, but sometimes its good to change things up”
A very good reason, in fact. If/when there’s a hard drive failure, it’s nice to have your sessions on something other than the OS drive, because in my experience it’s always been the OS drive that died.
Years ago, drive speeds, or lack thereof, wouldn’t allow for recording to the system drive. That’s no longer an issue.
I mainly prefer the added margin of safety.

[audiobob]

I have this from OWC with 4, 2gb SSD's. Yes, the fan is loud but I removed the cover and unplugged the fan and now, of course, there is zero noise as it sits about 3 feet from me on my desktop. I've checked the temp durning high use situations and it's just fine. It doesn't look so great but I'm working from home so it doesn't matter. The drive is fast, cool and quiet. If I need to take the drive somewhere it just takes a minute to plug the fan back in and the cover back on.

I also do the same thing with a Sonnet / Avid PCIe thunderbolt chassis with 1 HDX card. The fan on the enclosure is not loud at all but the fan on the HDX card is. So I removed the cover and the fan on the HDX never comes on. Yeah, doesn't look so great but it sounds great...and that's all I care about.

[BScout]

The OWC Thunderblade is a fanless thunderbolt (m2) drive. The whole case acts as a heatsink to make that possible.
There aren't any multidrive enclosures (only) that are fanless. The OWC Thunderbay (full size model not mini!) has a fan that can be replaced with a Noctuna fan and then is noiseless.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by rosindabow

I have a professional home studio. About to move up to the new Mac Studio. All my external hard drives need to be as quiet as they possibly can be. I have looked at some OWC Thunderbolt enclosures but they all have fans. Anyone find any external Thunderbolt drive enclosures that either do not have a fan or are whisper quiet?

If you are sensitive to noise the Mac Studio fan might possibly bother you. One solution for that and drive enclosure noise is to run the Mac Studio further away from your desktop, with a Corning Optical Thunderbolt 3 cable (e.g.https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CKC2RL2). You can then put the drive enclosure next to the remote Mac Studio. Or if for some reason you end up with a noisy drive enclosure but want the Mac Studio on your desk you can remote the drive enclosure with a optical Thunderbolt 3 cable. Only get the genuine Corning cable, they are expensive for multiple good reasons.

It is 2023 are you really using hard drives and not SSDs? Or did you mean SSD? The good use of hard drives is for backup and archiving, but then you don't do that while working on things and ideally disconnect/remove the backup/archive when they are not in use, so noise is maybe not an issue.

If you are looking at SSDs then the types, and brand/model and reliability etc. all matter. Whether you are looking for maximum performance will determine what type of SSD you use (e.g. SATA or M.2/NVMe). "Thunderbolt" tells you nothing about the drive, there are scumbag companies packaging slow HDD and slow SATA SSDs in Thunderbolt enclosures and marketing them as if that means they are fast.

The fastest, highest performance, lease hassle, and I'd suspect most reliable drive is to hold your nose and spend the $$$ with Apple and just upgrade your Mac SSD internally to be large enough to accommodate your samples and audio sessions. Anytime you put a modern (typically now PCIe 4 x 4 lane) M.2 drive on a slow old Thunderbolt 3/4 connection (which only delivers 4 x PCIe 3 lanes of I/O) you are reducing its sequential I/O performance something like 50%-100%. External SSDs, especially Thunderbolt or other USB-C drives likely have reliability limits from how easy it is to accidentally unplug a Thunderbolt/USB-C cable, just terrible design for reliability critical storage use. And this gets especially bad if you are trying to deal with multiple M.2 drives in individual enclosures, each connected to a Thunderbolt port. Just a mess... although if you want maximum aggregate I/O bandwidth from external M.2 drives this is likely the fastest way to get it.

A lot here depends on what exact SSD drives you are talking about, and what you want to do with them. As pointed out already M.2 drives will dissipate heat and need cooling, either passive to the drive enclosure or better with a fan. For other uses where you want good I/O performance from an M.2 and multiple drives you can always use a PCIe expansion chassis. If you put multiple M.2 drives in any enclosure the last thing you should be looking for is a fan less enclosure.

Many of the lower-end external Thunderbolt to M.2 expansion chassis are cheaply designed, and I especially include the OWC Express 4M2 in that. Stay away. It has four M.2 slots but no PCIe switch so it only connects one of Thunderbolt 3's four PCIe lanes to each M.2 card. So at any one time each M.2 drive can only get 1/4 of the Thunderbolt performance and the box then relies on software RAID to get the overall prevalence back. But then you have more risks caused by problems using RAID, and any unused M.2 slot just throws away performance the other slots cannot access. A just bad design.

I run multiple M.2 drives (mostly Samsung 980 Pro, and the 990s work just as well but cost a bit more for no real benefit) in multiple Sonnet Echo Express SE IIIe Thunderbolt 3 enclosures. But this is the kind of thing you want to do only if you want fast performance from multiple M.2 drives and avoid too much cable silliness, or if you have other PCIe cards like networking cards etc. (but don't mix M.2 storage with HDN or HDX Cards in the same chassis).

If you want only one M.2 card per PCIe slot use any cheap single M.2 slot adapter card should work, like this one https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01I5VABFY. The PCIe switch in the Sonnet chassis is doing PCIe traffic switching to each of the cards, if you need to run with multiple M.2 cards per adapter card then it's a longer discussion about cards with their own PCIe switches onboard.

The Sonnet Echo Express SE IIIe uses a very good Noctura fan and as long as I push the enclosures to the back of my desk behind the displays I cannot hear them running. You are paying more for quality and support with Sonnet enclosures. Do not run SSDs in the same Thunderbolt enclosure housing HD Native or HDX cards, that causes known problems.

M.2 drives are much higher performance than SATA for individual drive costs in the same ballpark, if you are building out external storage it makes little sense to go external SATA SSD. SATA HDD makes sense for external backup and archiving since very long term storage on SSD is not something I'd trust yet.

I'd stay away from Western Digital/SanDisk SSDs M.2 and external USB SSDs that I'd normally also recommend since they have been going through some data corruption issues and I'd want to see all that settle down for a while.

If you just want a small SSD for say moving stuff between computers, casual use, maybe sample storage, or nightly backups of sessions etc, and if your budget is tight, and you don't need the absolute fastest in performance... then forget M.2 and get a Samsung T7 SSD (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0874YHTXW), they are NVMe over USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Mbit/sec USB which the Mac Studio supports), not in the same league as the best Thunderbolt NVMe but still nice... and way faster than any HDD or SATA SSD. They have an Aluminium case passive radiator thermal design and are very small. No hassle finding an enclosure. If you just want a drive for moving stuff just get a Sandisk Extreme Pro (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B08GYPZ8GN) don't run sessions off it but they are fantastic for moving content.

[JFreak]

What people need is a "Put Noise Away, Inc." that provides set of cables to put the noise generating gear to a server closet a galaxy far away from you.

Optical thunderbolt has been available since 2011 and it can take your stuff about 60 meters away from your control room.

That is the fanless environment.