External SSD/NVMe recommendations?

[reichman]

Thank you again Darryl. I wasn't aware that heat was such an issue with this technology. You saved me from that OWC Envoy. I have a PCIe expansion chassis in the studio, but I'm really hoping to fit my new rig into a backpack (Mac Studio, laptop, external storage, etc.), so I'm willing to trade some performance for portability. All of which makes me think Glyph might be the way to go. Either (2) Atom Raid SSDs, or maybe (1) Atom Pro SSD. My hope is that Glyph has worked out the heat issues. If I wasn't so keen on portability, I would definitely do the Crest M.2 PCIe adapter cards you recommended. Those look great.

[Darryl Ramm]

Be careful...

The ATOM RAID is USB only, not Thunderbolt 3 the "compatible with Thunderbolt 3" statements are marketing BS that multiple vendors try to get away with. Glyph should know better... they mean it will work if plugged into (most) "Thunderbolt 3" USB-C ports, but it works as a USB 3.x device.

Atom Pro *is* Thunderbolt 3. And it's just a WD Black SN750 drive internally, and will have one Intel Thunderbolt to PCIe chip inside and not much more. You are paying ~$700 for a 2TB drive for what is a WD drive that by itself retails for ~$200. This is similar predatory pricing that Samsung has done with the X5. It's sad they don't have better competition going after them. But if you want a nice small portable external turnkey/brand name high performance drive these are where things are at.

Now Glyph might tweak the M.2 drive firmware and throttling set points etc. but I doubt it, and hope not. The case looks really nice from the outside, would have prefered to see cooling fins, and I hope that they have thermal pads around the M.2 drive to improve conductivity to the case, but I can't find any teardowns of that. if you get one please disassemble and send me photos. Screws are under the two rubber feet

I hope Glyph have good thermal bonding between the M.2 card and the case, some reviewers positively commented "the case does not get hot"... which might actually be worrying. And I'd be running that with the rubber bumper removed. The Samsung X5 has what look like good thermal bonding pads inside a large aluminum heat sink, but then the muppets wrap the whole thing in not-very thermally conductive plastic outer shell. And it does get hot to the touch when pushed. And the X5, at least the one I have is running older Samsung Evo M.2 drive technology and is slower than the Glyph Pro.

And both the Glyph Atom Pro and Samsung X5 are single USB-C thunderbolt ports so you can't chain through them.... which would be handy when portable and you need to just connect stuff.

So yep, it's a PITA, small compact drives from really trusted vendors are overpriced, you might well find portable enclosure that come with everything and including thermal bonding pads, but you are maybe taking a very small risk they might have problems.

[smurfyou]

I've had 0 issues running sessions on external SSD's through USB 3.1. I don't think Thunderbolt is a requirement for session storage. I get the desire if you're using a lot of sample based VI's. For post I've been good.

I understand the technical differences. I'm just going by real-world experience.

[reichman]

smurfyou: I'm doing post and Atmos music. For $1700 I can get an 8TB USB drive that does 1000MB/s, and for $2000 there's an 8TB Thunderbolt drive that does a mind-bending 2800MB/s. Right now when I'm mixing in Dolby Atmos, I often have to spread out the session and the Atmos recorder across (3) spinning hard drives to make it all run. I probably could get away with the USB SSD since my throughput is maybe in the 100-200 MB/s range (?).

Darryl: for years, I would never buy drives from Glyph because you could piece together the underlying components for much less. But I'm not entirely sure how to put this together from parts.

[smurfyou]

Once you're spending that much, $300 for the performance increase makes sense. I might go with the Atom Pro then. Despite what I said!

BTW I used to feel the same about Glyph. I would only buy them with other peoples money

I agree with Darryl, a lot of the DIY M.2 enclosures seem to have very inadequate cooling. I'd look for aluminum with fins if going that route. M.2's run hot.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by reichman

Darryl: for years, I would never buy drives from Glyph because you could piece together the underlying components for much less. But I'm not entirely sure how to put this together from parts.

I also avoided Glyph because of their overpriced HDD, but I'd buy G-Tech HDD back in the day. Well I'd love to peek into that 8TB drive as well, again send me photos I am going to just guess the 8TB is also a WD Black SN750 family drive, WD does not have a 8TB version commercially available now or AFAIK even announced, but Glyph may have early access to them. (The 8TB internals could also come from WD U.2 SSDs (U2==big brother to M.2) but that would make these drive even more expensive and faster.

The actual numbers you will get in sustained sequential IO and in random IO will be significantly less than these peak numbers, there are multiple good technical reviews/benchmarks of the SN750 online, including on Anandtech. These are impressive M.2 drives. but they are not even top of the range consumer WD SN850 M.2 drives, and those enterprise class U.2 drives will beat these even more. It's frustrating to me that we can buy 2TB incredibly fast very high quality M.2 drives for $200-$300 each. Often not really a lot more expensive than a much slower SATA III SSD, and in Mac land we don't have a really nice solutions to use M.2 drives. In a modern PC you can hopefully just plug 'em into a motherboard M.2 slots or into a PCIe to M.2 card adapter. And on AMD and latest Intel boards these can be PCIe 4 slots to work with the latest PCIe 4 M.2 drives. I really hope Apple has a good story with PCIe 4 (suspect it's too early to hope for PCIe 5) slots in the future Mac Pro which might take new base silicon components or PCIe IO chips hanging off current family silicon.

[reichman]

Follow-up after a couple of months of headaches and successes:

The Glyph Atom EV probably has a Team Drive in it. But I returned it because it isn't compatible with a Mac Pro 6,1's USB ports. It worked once, and then every subsequent connection to the 6,1 would cause the USB ports to stop working. I had to do an SMC reset to get the 6,1 back to usual operation. Glyph worked with me on this, and came to the conclusion that it would never work properly on a 6,1.

I've been using a Sonnet Echo Dual NVMe Thunderbolt Dock for about a month now, and it's fast becoming my favorite drive. It stays cool, it's very quiet (you won't hear it at all if it's behind your computer monitor), and with an OWC Auro P12 NVMe drive in it, it reliably delivers 1200MB/sec. all day long. Works with the Mac Pro 6,1 and will work with a Mac Studio.

Thanks again Darryl for your generosity and expertise!

PTE wrote about this quest on their website: High Speed Storage Solutions For Next Gen Computers Like Apple’s Mac Studio

[JR Fountain]

Nathaniel et al, thank you for all of this valuable info! It's been super helpful in getting my head around these new drives.