Which SSD Drive should I get?

[travisrex]

Hi all,

I'm in the market for an external SSD storage solution to partner my late 2014 trashcan Mac Pro. I compose music to video with heavy VI and plug-in use (mainly Waves).

I like the look of the Lacie Little big Disk 2 as it looks super fast and I could split the drives into a separate Audio/Video configuration. I'd keep my sample libraries on the internal SSD in the Mac Pro, Video on 1 of the Lacie SSDs and Sessions with Audio files on the other. I'm a bit put off by the price and lack of capacity however.

Can anyone out there recommend a cheaper and/or better option??

Thanks

[nst7]

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/

[JuanPC]

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/

keep in mind that SSD is NOT "Leave in the closet for a year storage solution" SSD are NOT a Long Term Storage Solution.
SSD are Not a High Temperature Tolerant Solution.

SSD must be turned-on regularly, and temperatures should not exceed 45°C,

[JoelG]

Samsung 850 EVO here that I'm happy with. It was very well priced from NewEgg.

Joel

EDIT: Sorry, missed "external" in OP..

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by travisrex

Hi all,

I'm in the market for an external SSD storage solution to partner my late 2014 trashcan Mac Pro. I compose music to video with heavy VI and plug-in use (mainly Waves).

I like the look of the Lacie Little big Disk 2 as it looks super fast and I could split the drives into a separate Audio/Video configuration. I'd keep my sample libraries on the internal SSD in the Mac Pro, Video on 1 of the Lacie SSDs and Sessions with Audio files on the other. I'm a bit put off by the price and lack of capacity however.

Can anyone out there recommend a cheaper and/or better option??

Thanks

"Better"? How?

There is not much close to this one from performance, nice packaging, and portability (with high-endish performance), that product uses dual M.2 PCIe SSDs in a Thunderbolt chassis. You can try roll your own by buying a thunderbolt expansion chassis and installing PCIe SSDs in it... and that will be more unweidy and cost more. Still the Little Big Disk 2 is showing it's age, it's not using latest NVMe M.2 cards, and can't exploit their 4 x PCIe 3 capability etc. since it's crippled by Thunderbolt 2.

But still if you care about performance the Little Big Disk 2 is way ahead of sticking slow old SATA SSDs in a Thunderbolt chassis. You have to work out what you are trying to do/need. If you want highest performance you won't be looking at SATA anything.

There is a lack of interesting high performance modern SSD external storage for the Mac market, I suspect all the vendors are waiting on Thunderbolt 3, which will better support high performance (and cheap) M.2 4 x PCIe 3 drives like the Samsung 950 Pro... with similar (maybe even better) performance to the boot drive in your Mac Trashcan. But your Thunderbolt 2 Trashcan won't be able to benefit from that Thunderbolt 3 performance. Oh well it's Apple's walled garden, you just paid them to build the walls.

If you want low cost SSD, then Samsung 850 Evo or Pro (or some Micron or others, but Samsung dominate this market for a reason) in an external box (like the OWC mentioned earlier), used as JBOD not RAID.

[mesaone]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

JBOD

I had to google this. "Just a Bunch Of Disks"

[ronwasserman]

I'm running 4 of these for all my VI/loop library stuff in a powered USB hub on a trashcan Mac. No problems whatsoever. (I'm using 2X500GB and 2X1TB) Super fast like my LaCie Little Big Drives.

http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/m...e/MU-PS1T0B/AM