SSD?

[spinsong]

You mention malarkey when you should look at some of the advice you’re posting. Instead of playing catch-up with outdated incompatible chips, get with the game and go with what avid suggests, an external drive.


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[raypiasecki]

I can only speculate a few things: Ive been told for max performance its good to have at least 30% free space on the drive. The following: might only be relevant for older drives, but do keep in mind that the bigger the drive the more addressing there might need to be. Maybe watch out for going for a couple of 500gb instead of a huge 4TB for speed reasons. Also depending on your needs, you can keep multiple back-ups this way as well.
Look for max read and write speeds. Keep in mind that when your reading and writing at the same time or simultaneously that those speeds will not be at the max, the SSD/Internal Drive will be at work. That makes me wonder(again im new to this) when using an internal drive if it will be taxed(doing simultaneous reading/writing and/or buffering and/or loading things into RAM for Pro Tools) and if an external SSD will speed things up by using another medium?
I [THINK] that different SSD drives have different protocols(USB 3.0/3.1/TB3) etc.. Think about a few things:
1)protocols: Are you going to be collaborating with others[older computers/other pklatforms(PC/MAC)]? Filesystems?[no sure but maybe: different filesystems offer different speeds on the drive do to the partition maps] also[different filesystems can offer more performance-collaboration between platforms?[PC/Mac - need to have a universal filesystem, slow down performance?]] due note that newer MACs and PC have optimized filesystems that only work with their own type[PC/MAC].
Ive also heard that its good to have a separate SSD for housing samples, this could lead into the fact why I'm thinking read/write speeds will be drowned by simultaneous read/write because samples will be read only and loaded into RAM while needed? maybe only relevant for lots of samples? just something to watch out for, if im thinking correctly

[Darryl Ramm]

Can you please read the advice already written in this thread by somebody (me!) who actually understands what they are talking about. I've specifically replied to the OP about a specific system they are thinking of buying. That system has one or two super fast NVMe/PCIe internal drives that could be used here. External drives can sure be considered as well but not for performance reasons which you raise here.

Again. As I've already said in this thread. Most external drives will be _slower_ than the internal PCIe/NVMe SSDs. That includes all USB/SATA and USB/NVMe drives. And you won't practically install enough of them to make any meaningful drive speed here faster than just using the internal drives.... but here you go suggesting exactly what I've already pointed out will typically be slower.

You can get into the same performance ballpark as the internal SSD with external Thunderbolt 3/NVMe SSDs, but by that point the price (esp. with Samsung X5) or complexity (installing M.2 drives in carriers or expansion chassis) is probably not worth it for most users.

And on free space/performance... on sample drives or shared large drives that are almost all samples (or other content that is not written to) you can run them at quite low free space. Even if being written to a lot simple advice like 30% free makes less sense as drives get larger and larger and the bulk of the content is never written to, it can be better to think about how much stuff is "active" or hot on the drive, e.g. maybe sessions are taking 10 GB in total. And so you want a few 10GB of free/scratch space at least. And for a boot drive, well I'd want more, maybe 50-100GB spare, part of that is wanting the flexibility of having some test space if needing to install a new boot container.

Technical side comment: SSDs actually maintain invisible unused space for writing efficiency and long life. It's typically around 7% of the drive size. In days before everything supported TRIM and filesystem were not SSD optimized some of us would increase that.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

I use this combo for running a Parallels Windows VM and these are my speeds with Catalina on a 2020 iMac i9 27" with 64GB of RAM:



WD_BLACK 1TB SN750 NVMe Internal Gaming SSD Solid State Drive - Gen3 PCIe, M.2 2280, 3D NAND, Up to 3,470 MB/s - WDS100T3X0C

Thunderbolt 3 SSD Enclosure,Thunderbolt3 to NVME M.2 2280 Hard Drive Case Compatible with New M1 CPU

I haven't tested it with my MacBook Pro M1 Max 64GB yet.

Rail

[Ben Jenssen]

Rail! Long time no see. Nice to see you back.

[rossrooney]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Ah excellent.

No change your thinking now.

The best drive you can get on this Mac is the internal SSD. Stop thinking you must use an external drive(s). Old rules about seperate drives for sessions and samples etc. no longer apply... and in many cases trying to do that will give you worse performance than everything on the internal blindingly fast PCIe/NVMe SSD, especially on these iMacs with limited external expansion/connectivity.

The best thing you can likely do is try to fit samples and sessions on that internal SSD along with all the macOS stuff. Just hold your nose and pay the Apple tax/price on that SSD and max out the size of that SSD as much as you can afford. It's nice not to have external cables/connections and the speed, well you won't know what hit you if you are on Firewire/SATA drives today.

But I asked about sizes of samples... if you have many TB of samples and then it may make more sense to put on an external drive. And for lower-cost uses then something like a Samsung T7 SSD can be a good choice. They are tiny, can literally be stuck to the back of the iMac etc. But it's slower, not a PCIe drive, but rather a NVMe over USB drive which is a little unusual, and just a bit faster than old SATA drives. I've lost track of how many T5 and T7 drives I have, they are great for what they are but I can't state enough that if I was buying an new iMac I would aim to max out the internal SSD at time of purchases (you can't upgrade the internal SSD later). High performance external PCIe based drives use Thunderbolt 3 and include the Samsung X5 (bit overpriced) and similar and options of installing M.2 cards in PCIe expansion chassis for folks who want to play/need lots of storage... e.g. I' have Samsung M.2 980 Pro SSDs in an Thunderbolt 3 expansion chassis for my MacBook Pro... as well as X5, T5, T7, ...

And on a modern Mac you are going to be running an APFS not HFS+ file system or your boot drive and you are likely better off using that on any external drive (more robust and higher performance than HFS+) unless you need backward connection compatibility/portability.

And I assume you know about the Apple transition to M1/Apple silicon and are grabbing one of the last of the Intel iMacs? (there still might be some future Intel product bumps).

Edit: And on the internal SSD upgrades: I believe these current 27" models have up to 4TB of SSD on the motherboard, and part of their T2 security protected mumble mumble stuff, and if the Mac is ordered with 8TB has the next 4TB on a plug-in Apple PCIe card, but that card socket is not included on the motherboard unless the original order has 8TB. Oh Apple and your stupid walled garden. (I'd love to hear that somebody has hand soldered on those components and got a SSD card slot working ) Anyhow mere mortals like us just order the iMac with as large an internal SSD as we can possibly afford.

Darryl Ramm ... thanks very much for this very informative post. I'm in the process of buying a Mac mini to use with Avid Carbon, ATM using a 2019 MacBook Pro 16" but have big issues with fan on constantly and periodic crashes. I had planned to use external drives as was drilled into us 10/15 years ago but happy to take your advice and max out the internal ssd..... frees up a port too! Thanks again.... BTW do you believe the new Mini M1 maxed is a good fit for Carbon?... using an LG widescreen monitor at the moment.... would have liked to use two apple thunderbolt 27" but I believe there can be issues. Cheers again & take care...Ross

[spinsong]

Look, the whole rant wasn’t about efficiency. The ssds are high speed beasts. The problem has to do with failure. Silicon on a chip is fine and dandy, however, it’s prone to failure if badly abused. With an external there’s less risk of frying your motherboard that has everything soldered in. Look it up. Countless posts of ssds failing. I’ve had a couple fail on me as well. Out the frying pan and into the fire. Spinners have more longevity, and work well. Most bang for the buck. Get enterprise grade, they have the most longevity, built for multiple read writes. That’s what you need when recording. It’s like comparing a toaster to an oven.
Also, to add fuel to the mix. How long do you think that fine etching is going to hold out before it turns into a solid clump of solder. You can’t beat the laws of nature and physics. The tendency to disperse and how heat melts metals. There’s a law in physics that mentions going towards disorder in substances. To the point there’s most likely a mathematical equation that explains failure through the laws of physics. They know about this, it doesn’t matter. All it equates to is more sales.

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[TimothyJohn]

every
single
spinning drive I EVER used
has failed.

16" MacBook Pro-M1 Pro-32gb RAM, 2tb SSD.
Samsung T5 2tb b/up for docs and audio files.
Samsung T7 2tb b/up for video.
OWC SSD 6g 1tb, originally used as a system drive for my 17" i7 MacBook Pro is now used as my Time Machine.

I also have a number of SD cards.

I will not buy another spinner. I've been tempted.But all I need t todo is look at the 100% FAIL RATE ...

😎

[spinsong]

Enterprise grade drives almost never fail. Stay away from crappy bargain basement drives and invest in a viable solution.
Rarely had failure on dependable drives, have back ups including raids still going strong after 20 years back to ide drives. The same goes for music mediums. They don’t make them like they used to. Records outlast tapes, tapes outlast hard drives. etc. You might think in someways they’re moving forward, but in other ways they’re moving back. How many “gigs” of speed do you need to record an audio track. Where’s your bottleneck. Or is it believe none what you hear and half of what you see. I was able to run 4 video games off a 1.4 meg floppy on an older system that had higher resolution than some of the newer games that take up gigs. Get with the program.
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[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by spinsong

Look, the whole rant wasn’t about efficiency. The ssds are high speed beasts. The problem has to do with failure. Silicon on a chip is fine and dandy, however, it’s prone to failure if badly abused. With an external there’s less risk of frying your motherboard that has everything soldered in. Look it up. Countless posts of ssds failing. I’ve had a couple fail on me as well. Out the frying pan and into the fire. Spinners have more longevity, and work well. Most bang for the buck. Get enterprise grade, they have the most longevity, built for multiple read writes. That’s what you need when recording. It’s like comparing a toaster to an oven.
Also, to add fuel to the mix. How long do you think that fine etching is going to hold out before it turns into a solid clump of solder. You can’t beat the laws of nature and physics. The tendency to disperse and how heat melts metals. There’s a law in physics that mentions going towards disorder in substances. To the point there’s most likely a mathematical equation that explains failure through the laws of physics. They know about this, it doesn’t matter. All it equates to is more sales.

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You keep posting incoherent rambling about stuff, "fine etching and lumps of solder", seek help. And a motherboard is not likely to be damaged from (any remote possibility of a) failure of a soldered on SSD. The issue is more the hassle involved in having the soldered on SSD replaced, but which again is extremely unlikely to happen (and typically folks here are going to find SSDs more reliable that more fragile spinning disks).

Countless posts of SSDs failing? On DUC? With DAWs? Where? Right, countless as in I can barely find any to count and many folks here have been using SSDs for years now, including in large studios and demanding post applications...

Laws of Physics? You are talking about the second law of thermodynamics, look it up. It is not relevant here, except for the high entropy of your posts.

I have an undergrad degree in Physics, and some post grad research in electronics, have product managed large computer systems development, and am very familiar with failure/reliability modelling, and SSD wear and life models (but it's so good it's not worth worrying about for DAW uses). And I can't even start to think how to respond to your rambling nonsense.

I really could not care if you sat in a corner by yourself in a pool of drool posting these ramblings, but folks come here seeking advice and I'd hate anybody to accidentally follow any of this nonsense from you.