USB 4 vs USB 3.2 for system extension?

[atticmike]

Hello there,

I'm about to hop onto the M4 Pro Mini-Wagon but don't see myself spending the extra money for Apple's storage prices.

My plan is to get a 4 TB external drive to play my Pro Tools sessions back from it.

Do you think it's necessary to get a USB 4 enclosure or will something like a Crucial X9 Pro suffice for professional work in stereo and Dolby Atmos?

It's my first time using a Mac again since 2016 when I swapped my Mac Pro for a windows workstation, currently running an Intel 14900K.

I'm mainly using Pro Tools Ultimate natively without HDX / Native and occasionally Ableton Live.

I'd hugely appreciate assistance in this matter.

[Darryl Ramm]

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "systems extensions", but if you just mean an audio/session drive...

USB 3.what what? And USB 4 what? USB 4 V1 ? V2? You need to be careful here, "USB 4" especially may not be the spec you want to pay attention to, for example the Mac Mini supports USB 4 and Thunderbolt 3/4 (which are not guaranteed to be there just because of "USB 4") but the Mini *Pro* also supports Thunderbolt 5.

The Crucial drive is USB 3.2 Gen 2 which means at best you get 10 Gbit/sec on the physical link layer. Which may be fine but it's slower than you'll get from Thunderbolt 3/4 drives (40 Gbit/sec) or certainly chassis (with multiple drives in them) or Thunderbolt 5 (80 Gbit/sec for data). If you are looking at USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSDs the market leader there is the Samsung T7. Both are NVMe over USB 3.2 Gen 2, Samsung was a player there firsl. Keep an eye out for Crucial firmware updates and update utility, see if they run OK on Apple silicon Macs. Crucial should have better support there than many other SSD vendors, and hopefully a positive, (like Samsung) is they develop their own firmware and so are not reliant on the whims and mistakes, and fix schedules, of third party software providers.

What are you tying to solve for? With suitably sized disk cache audio file read should be a non-issue, it takes some serious pushing to saturate SSD disk writes, you might see things like startup times be impacted by Vi sample loading. Backup/recovery times might be significantly impacted, very dependent on how the backups are done. For me personally it's non-audio apps (like compiling software, some databases, running virtual machines etc. as well as fast backup and recovery). that actually benefit most from having Thunderbolt 3/4 PCIe/NVMe SSDs on my Macs.

I'd like to see the latest M4 Pro I/O actually benchmarked with modern USB and Thunderbolt SSD. Including because they support Thunderbolt 5 (80 Gbit/sec link speed) and Thunderbolt 3/4 (20 Gbit/sec link speed) and probably don't support USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbit/sec) and some older Macs sometimes even had problems with USB 3.2 Gen 2 performance (but handled faster Thunderbolt 3 OK).

Make sure you are up on how to check and update third party SSD firmware. That's one of the disadvantages of not using those expensive Apple SSDs.

What is best for you all depends on how much capacity, and performance you want and what your budget is. I personally would have an eye on what Thunderbolt 5/PCIe 4 chassis are going to appear on the market. The current (and now past current) PCIe 4/NVMe SSDs will deliver stunning performance in those chassis... and be very competitively priced as individual M.2 SSDs). Like the current Samsung 990 Pro. (~$300 for 4TB, or you might be better off with multiple 2TB drives, depends on what you are doing). I'd like to especially see what Sonnet does with Thunderbolt 5 chassis.

OWC has a Thunderbolt 5 SDD in the market, I sure would like to see some well conducted performance be benchmark on that as well as other drives entering the market.

[saqibhassan]

Im using this USB4 MAIWO K1717 40Gbps NVMe SSD Enclosure with my M2Pro Mac mini.
https://www.maiwo360.com/SSDHDDEnclosure/505.html
It has Samsung 990Pro 4TB inside. Giving me 3000 MB pr sec Read/write.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by saqibhassan

Im using this USB4 MAIWO K1717 40Gbps NVMe SSD Enclosure with my M2Pro Mac mini.
https://www.maiwo360.com/SSDHDDEnclosure/505.html
It has Samsung 990Pro 4TB inside. Giving me 3000 MB pr sec Read/write.

And to avoid confusion here this is a Thunderbolt 3/4 enclosure, not all USB4 peripherals/enclosures also support Thunderbolt 3/4. (And the manufacturer does a good job describing that but I want to make it very clear here).

[atticmike]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "systems extensions", but if you just mean an audio/session drive...

Well, firstly as a session drive and possibly also to extend my system drive with, seen be tutorials from YouTubers.

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

USB 3.what what? And USB 4 what? USB 4 V1 ? V2? You need to be careful here, "USB 4" especially may not be the spec you want to pay attention to, for example the Mac Mini supports USB 4 and Thunderbolt 3/4 (which are not guaranteed to be there just because of "USB 4") but the Mini *Pro* also supports Thunderbolt 5.

Well currently the fastest drives for Macs and new M4 chipset systems are ASMedia ASM2464PD USB4 based, besides that one drive Sabrent released, a company that I don't really trust and which also had the worst and hottest TB3 / USB4 drives on the market, with underperforming specs.

The ASM2464PD USB4 enclosure which I'd go with, which achieves 3700 MB/s read and 3200 MB/s write while staying coolest and most reliable is the OWC Express 1M2. There are some other options from Satechi, Zike, Orico, Acasis and more but the OWC seems to be the most professional and reliable enclosure.

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

The Crucial drive is USB 3.2 Gen 2 which means at best you get 10 Gbit/sec on the physical link layer. Which may be fine but it's slower than you'll get from Thunderbolt 3/4 drives (40 Gbit/sec) or certainly chassis (with multiple drives in them) or Thunderbolt 5 (80 Gbit/sec for data). If you are looking at USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSDs the market leader there is the Samsung T7. Both are NVMe over USB 3.2 Gen 2, Samsung was a player there firsl. Keep an eye out for Crucial firmware updates and update utility, see if they run OK on Apple silicon Macs. Crucial should have better support there than many other SSD vendors, and hopefully a positive, (like Samsung) is they develop their own firmware and so are not reliant on the whims and mistakes, and fix schedules, of third party software providers.

What are you tying to solve for? With suitably sized disk cache audio file read should be a non-issue, it takes some serious pushing to saturate SSD disk writes, you might see things like startup times be impacted by Vi sample loading. Backup/recovery times might be significantly impacted, very dependent on how the backups are done. For me personally it's non-audio apps (like compiling software, some databases, running virtual machines etc. as well as fast backup and recovery). that actually benefit most from having Thunderbolt 3/4 PCIe/NVMe SSDs on my Macs.

As stated before, the most reliable chipset currently isn't a TB4 but USB4 with enclosures that run the ASM2464PD.

And don't forget ever since they introduced USB4 and Thunderbolt 4/5, the lines have blurred with the interface and it's possible functions because USB4 supports Thunderbolt 4 and vice versa, both using PCI-Express, the only thing USB4 can't do is tunneling, daisy chaining and some other exotic features, which are not necessary for a data drive.

I'm mostly concerned about running Pro Tools and my sessions properly without any bottlenecking, which obviously also includes the aforementioned audio cache and the question is whether I really need 40 GB/s to do and possibly would better off with 10 GB/s drive, besides data backup?

Although NVMe drives have a much faster random read and write speed performance as well as lowest latency (I could see particularly when booting the OS on my Windows workstation vs a regular SSD), so I'm wondering whether that actually might improve / extend the M4's performance due to reduced latency? Which in the end could lead to more processing headroom of the processor itself? What I mean by that, is whether there's possibly a bottleneck in terms of latency and reaction times that might lead to a reduced CPU performance due to the USB 3.2 interface versus a PCI-Express connection, disregarding the transfer speed numbers?

I can't really recommend the Samsung T7 and T9 drives, they are marketed and recommended amongst creative content communities and YouTubers as THE drive for professional use and are actually some of the most unreliable and poor performing drives on the market. Besides random disconnects and ejects that can happen with them, they have the chance to lose all your data during these dropouts, run generally hot and through that loose lots of transfer performance and regularly tend to die early on.

The best and most reliable external retail 10 GB/s drives from SSD manufacturers are the X9 Pro and X10 Pro by Crucial.

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I'd like to see the latest M4 Pro I/O actually benchmarked with modern USB and Thunderbolt SSD. Including because they support Thunderbolt 5 (80 Gbit/sec link speed) and Thunderbolt 3/4 (20 Gbit/sec link speed) and probably don't support USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbit/sec) and some older Macs sometimes even had problems with USB 3.2 Gen 2 performance (but handled faster Thunderbolt 3 OK).

Well, for TB4/USB4, the ASM2464PD is currently the fastest and most reliable chipset if you are happy with 3700/3400 MB/s, Thunderbolt 5 drives are just being launched and tested and frankly with these, the cooling will be more a problem than the performance of the actual chipset running these.

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Make sure you are up on how to check and update third party SSD firmware. That's one of the disadvantages of not using those expensive Apple SSDs.

What is best for you all depends on how much capacity, and performance you want and what your budget is. I personally would have an eye on what Thunderbolt 5/PCIe 4 chassis are going to appear on the market. The current (and now past current) PCIe 4/NVMe SSDs will deliver stunning performance in those chassis... and be very competitively priced as individual M.2 SSDs). Like the current Samsung 990 Pro. (~$300 for 4TB, or you might be better off with multiple 2TB drives, depends on what you are doing). I'd like to especially see what Sonnet does with Thunderbolt 5 chassis.

OWC has a Thunderbolt 5 SDD in the market, I sure would like to see some well conducted performance be benchmark on that as well as other drives entering the market.

Yeah, if I have to go USB4, I'll definitely pick OWC's USB4 drive, I've already received it yesterday.

For me personally, 10 GB/s in terms of transfer speed would already suffice when copying and pasting data, I'm more concerned about the performance numbers that might affect the system's performance.

Originally Posted by saqibhassan

Im using this USB4 MAIWO K1717 40Gbps NVMe SSD Enclosure with my M2Pro Mac mini.
https://www.maiwo360.com/SSDHDDEnclosure/505.html
It has Samsung 990Pro 4TB inside. Giving me 3000 MB pr sec Read/write.

I've already picked the OWC Express 1M2 for that task but I appreciate the recommendation. I'm just not sure whether to pick the 990 Pro or SN850X.

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

And to avoid confusion here this is a Thunderbolt 3/4 enclosure, not all USB4 peripherals/enclosures also support Thunderbolt 3/4. (And the manufacturer does a good job describing that but I want to make it very clear here).

You don't need thunderbolt features for external drives and USB4/TB4 are anyways almost identical in features, running off PCI-Express and support each other.

[atticmike]

USB4 and Thunderbolt 4 is quite messy and it's either or, especially for external drives and USB4 drives are the best option when it comes to reliability and speed compared to thunderbolt 4 chips, Linus actually, even though I don't like that dude generally, has done a great video 2 years ago.

https://youtu.be/C6aCCp-Umcw?si=o5HuTbW3ytLcMy43

Thunderbolt 5 is uninteresting for me because I frankly wouldn't need that speed for audio related work, even when copying and pasting sessions around, that's in my opinion more helpful for people who work with video. USB4 already in my opinion meets the speeds I'd need and far beyond.

Don't know what the benefit would be going with a TB5 drive besides the faster sequential read and write speeds and with that less durability/ reliability due to higher temperatures.

[EGS]

Originally Posted by atticmike

... frankly wouldn't need that speed for audio related work ...

Yep. With Pro Tools disk cache set to a high value, any drive is fast enough - even a flashdrive.

Having said that, I run sessions from an internal NVME PCIe 4 drive, with a Pro Tools disk cache setting of 8GB.

[atticmike]

Originally Posted by EGS

Yep. With Pro Tools disk cache set to a high value, any drive is fast enough - even a flashdrive.

Having said that, I run sessions from an internal NVME PCIe 4 drive, with a Pro Tools disk cache setting of 8GB.

I guess I'm more concerned about the PCI-Express benefit of latency and fast communication speeds that might benefit the CPU operating better rather than the maximum data transfer speeds which for audio are rather uninteresting.

I'd love for people to test this aspect rather than running Blackmagic Disk Speed like a monkey "wow, 3700 MB/s, this drive is fast omg, best drive ever".

So you're saying I would be fine with a Crucial X9 Pro?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by atticmike

Well currently the fastest drives for Macs and new M4 chipset systems are ASMedia ASM2464PD USB4 based, besides that one drive Sabrent released, a company that I don't really trust and which also had the worst and hottest TB3 / USB4 drives on the market, with underperforming specs.

You keep saying USB4 and I keep trying to correct you. The ASM246PD is fast not because it implements USB4 but because it implements Thunderbolt 3/4. It is likely to offer the same performance as other Thunderbolt 3/4 chipsets.

[smurfyou]

Too many words in this thread.

Short answer, yes it will be quite fine. For PT use.

System drive is another can of worms on a Mac.