Sessions on APFS or HFS+

[Mixmaster Rick]

I will be introducing a new external SSD for all of my Sessions and would like to know if the new drive should be formatted as APFS or HFS+.

Thanks

[GoButtonGuy]

Anything new connected to a new(er) Mac I do APFS. Structurally it's a better fit for SSDs and is the standard for contemporary Macs.

[Darryl Ramm]

APFS without a doubt in the world.

But what SSD... SSDs vary from slow badly done pieces of crap to ultrafast PCIe/NVMe drives.

But if you have a Studio I'd be recording to the internal drive, and have samples there if it could fit. That will be significantly faster than any external SSD you can connect. All the old rules of *having* to have separate session drives no longer apply, and doing that will likely reduce performance on Studio systems.

[Mixmaster Rick]

Thanks for the reply.

I just got a G-Technology / SanDisk G-Drive Pro 1TB. Thunderbolt 3 (40Gbps)

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Mixmaster Rick

Thanks for the reply.

I just got a G-Technology / SanDisk G-Drive Pro 1TB. Thunderbolt 3 (40Gbps)

I would love to know what is exactly inside that drive, but great that it's real NVMe in a Thunderbolt package and not SATA in a Thunderbolt package. I'm guessing it's has WD SN750 inside it, or technology from the SN750. Western Digital/Sandisk is doing really well with high-end consumer SSD technology e.g. their SN850 M.2 drives are stunning fast. I suspect they have a bit lower end drives packaged in this enclosure.

BTW Thunderbolt data is not 40 Gbit/s, regardless of what marketing weenies say. It's 32 Gbit/sec for data i.e. the 4 x PCIe3 lanes embedded in Thunderbolt 3/4 the other 8 Gbit/s is for video.

And 32 Git/s or 4GB/s is not what this drives will provide, it's likely more ~1GB/s-~1.5GB/sec depending on what you are measuring and dropping below 1GB/sec for sustained writes that fill the (SLC) cache on the drive. So totally guessing but maybe it's ~ half the performance or so of the internal SSD. And that's good, and so fast you'll likely not notice it unless measuring it.

BTW if you get it and can run the simple default BlackMagic Speed tests on it I'd like to know what it says (just simple numbers, that Speed Test may not show what real-world performance the drive will give for different workloads).

[GoButtonGuy]

If you're doing everything for yourself and don't need to bounce many files in and out of the box the internal storage is as fast as it gets. For a few tracks copying in or out isn't too bad. For many it can be quite the wait.

If you need to be able to either transport, share or get sessions to anyone else an external drive will be more flexible particularly if there are video clips involved.

At the day gig we use Blackmagic thunderbolt drive bays with OWC Mercury drives. Not the fastest but plenty reliable for either audio tracking or HD video recording. We track 128 tracks, one take 90 mins at a time, twice a night, five nights a week (the video is on a Hyperdeck Pro).

My MBP M1 Pro has a SK hylinx Platnum P41 as the session/content drive. Paired with a Fledging Shell Thunder enclosure it registers 2500-2600 MB/s on the Blackmagic bench both ways.

The native MBP storage is around 4000-4500 MB/s both ways on the Blackmagic bench.

Tom's has this.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...p41-ssd-review

[Mixmaster Rick]

Best practice is to have sessions on another volume separate from the OS. This drive IS fast and exactly what I hoped for.

Blackmagic stats for the drive with a 5GB load running for 30 minutes, screenshot attached.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Mixmaster Rick

Best practice is to have sessions on another volume separate from the OS. This drive IS fast and exactly what I hoped for.

Where to put the sessions is a matter of choice/workflow. There is no *need* they have to be external or separate physical drives. There are arguments both ways.. e.g. with portable/transportable gear I prefer not to have to deal with external cable (especially non-locking USB-C connectors) and drives.

Since those numbers are a bit lower than I expect for a internal SN850 drive I'm going to stick with guessing Western Digital is likely using the guts of a SN750 in the drive. It will have a knee in performance as the internal ~1GB SLC cache fills, or if it gets hot. But for this class of packaged external Thunderbolt drives using a drive like that is expected. Like Samsung uses an older 970 Evo internals in their equivalent X5. Western Digital/Sandisk essentially pull the rug out from under the Samsung X5 with this product with is a good thing. The X5 is overpriced, old and has poor thermal design. And overall with Western Digital there is now a very worthy competitor to Samsung in high end consumer external drives, M.2 and U.2 drives etc., already beating Samsung with multiple products.

[BScout]

Originally Posted by Mixmaster Rick

Best practice is to have sessions on another volume separate from the OS.

That was back in spinner drive times. As Darryl points out, that is not meaningful at all today (search cue depth of SSDs is multiple orders of magnitude greater than spinners not to mention the general speed of NVMe drives or PCIe lane drives (thunderbolt)). On a modern system, it does not matter.