[ejs]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

If only somebody had provided info about this in the thread you are already posting to...

Thank you for your reply.

"If you have a PCIe/NVMe boot drive then the best place to put your sessions is often that drive not an external drive, certainly not an external old HDD. For small sessions you might get away running them off a SATA SSD boot drive..."

Avid''s knowledge base article is horribly out of date. All their comments on disk drives are from prehistory. They seem unable, or just don't care enough to update this info.

This is unfortunate and makes things confusing

Yes that's a PCIe/NVMe drive similar to the internal SSD, but the internal SSD is already so fast you will not need this external dedicated drive. And especially for portable applications, you likely decrease reliability be using an external drive with a fragile cable connection.

If you wanted to donate money for an unneeded external audio drive personally would use a Samsung X5 drive. I don't have anything bad to say about this drive but I'd rather purchase drives from the leading SSD vendor who controls the whole stack from NAND chips to controllers to firmware... and who does not depend on their party controller chips and firmware, and is able to fix issues themselves.

The harder question is often how much space do you need for samples and where are you going to put them. Putting samples on the same drive as audio is often much more demanding that putting audio on the boot drive... but again these modern drives are so fast (and modern Pro Tools disk cache hides many sins anyhow) you can typically do that, *if* there is space.... so my advice to mac purchasers is to do whatever is possible to max out the size of that internal SSD, even at Apple SSD price points.

I have less than 100GB sample libraries right now so perhaps best to use the Mac mini for both audio and samples now and get a dedicated sample drive if/when that becomes necessary.

You need to think through in detail what exactly is involved in recovering from any failure or user mistake. Time Machine is an awful tool to use for system backups. It can be useful for backing up user documents and sessions... but I would prefer to manually copy important sessions to archive them. And do so in multiple different places, onto multiple different media. Including some offside. And include copying to cloud storage like Google Cloud. I would not rely on just SSD for long term storage. HDD are more proven, and I'd be looking for WD based HDD units (which G-Tech, owned by WD, will use).. but you want 7,200 rpm drives ... which the one you are looking at has (be careful of other WD external drives they do tend to package some slow/crappy drives in external enclosures). As already note, you need multiple of these drives.

Are my OWC Mercury Elite Pro Firewire/eSATA/USB drives (1TB and 500G) sufficient for these types of backup?
If I wanted more storage in those enclosures are Seagate BarraCuda 2TB HDD – 3.5 Inch SATA 6Gb/s 7200 RPM 256MB Cache acceptable or must they be WD? They’re only $55 on Amazon

Cloning the boot drive with Carbon Copy Cloner is much better that using Time machine and what many people here do. If a failure happens you just connect that clone drive and boot off it and are up and running... for that reason you might actually want to clone to a fast SSD like a Samsung X5. That's what I do... I have one Samsung X5 amongst my other slower boot drive clones (mostly Samsung T5). I also use that fast SSD for testing new macOS releases using another APFS container on that drive. SSD for boot drive clones for speed.... but they are not relied on for long term archives so OK to be on SSD.

Is 2TB enough capacity to Clone the 2TB Mac mini? After I move my current audio drive files to it will likely have used about 1TB.
Bombich.com recommends U32 Shadow External SSD USB-C Portable Solid State Drive (USB 3.1 Gen 2) which has a 4TB version for $600. https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/choosing-backup-drive.

Boot drives clones should not be the only place you backup/archive your sessions if they are on the boot drive. The sessions are presumably much more important than the OS and apps and plugins, all of which can be reinstalled.

But even for boot drive clones have multiple external drives and rotate between those. A likely time you will encounter a boot drive failure is when it is being read while making a backup or clone... at which point your boot drive is toast, and you've also likely just corrupted your only backup as well.

This is getting expensive

Like your other question about do you need a dedicated audio drive this has been discussed hundreds and hundreds of times on DUC and you can find all you need by searching DUC (use google search with a site:duc.avid.com qualifier).

Thank you again for your helpful reply