APFS drive for media MacStudio Ultra Ventura

[alberto64]

Hi there,

Is anyone working with an external NVME M2 drive formatted APFS for media with Protools?
I’ve just received a MacStudio Ultra OS Ventura and I’m asking myself what the best setup.

Thank you for your feeds

[Darryl Ramm]

Yes. 14 TB+ of M.2 external drives all formatted APFS, much less data on them than that. APFS is one of the most proven trusted/widely used file systems in the world. The only reason to not use APFS is on transfer drives if you need to move stuff to very old systems. But then I'd move stuff on USB thumb drives formatted HFS+ or exFAT.

The M.2 drives I prefer are WD Black SN850 and Samsung 980 Pro. They are fast with PCIe 4 support they will suffer some performance hit from being installed over a slower Thunderbolt 3/4/PCIe3 connection (and affected by sharing if on a single Thunderbolt link). But in the big picture still fast, but not as fast as the internal Mac Studio SSDs.

What are you installing the M.2 drives in?

I have them installed in Sonnet Echo Express SEIIIe Thunderbolt 3 chassis and single PCIe slot to M.2 adapter cards (so that all switch/bifurcation support is provided by the Sonnet chassis PCIe switch and you can use any cheap/dumb PCIe3 to M.2 adapter card. It's chunky/large but nice for my needs. If you want the fastest possible aggregate IO you'll spread out M.2 drives in smaller Thunderbolt mounting packaging. Stay away from some low-cost cheaply designed M.2 enclosures that say only pass say a single or double PCIe lane to each M.2 card. Like the OWC Express 4M2.

A lot of thermal needs depends on use but I would use these drives with the factory heatsink option if there is space/internal blown air cooling (like that Sonnet chassis' great quiet but effective fan). Be careful of any case/packaging that does not have good passive conductive cooling with good thermal bonding from the M.2 to the case or a fan and vents.

And as always the first thing you do with any SSD drive is check its firmware is up to date.

[JFreak]

^ Great advise for high performance.

Another point of view is for example this OWC Envoy Express enclosure that I use for (relatively small) file transfers. While it is TB3 it is still only about 1500MBps, which isn't actually slow but doesn't require top dollar spent on top speed m.2 SSD blade.

Still... if it is not spinning, you should use APFS file system.

[alberto64]

Thank you guys, great infos!

I've bought the OWC Envoy Express with a 1Tb Sabrent Rocket SSD NVMe PCIe M.2 to use for my projects, the MacSudio Ultra is with an 8 Tb internal disk, I'll add a volume which will be named Sounds for my libraries and I hope to work without issues.

[chris.d]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Yes. 14 TB+ of M.2 external drives all formatted APFS, much less data on them than that. APFS is one of the most proven trusted/widely used file systems in the world. The only reason to not use APFS is on transfer drives if you need to move stuff to very old systems. But then I'd move stuff on USB thumb drives formatted HFS+ or exFAT.

The M.2 drives I prefer are WD Black SN850 and Samsung 980 Pro. They are fast with PCIe 4 support they will suffer some performance hit from being installed over a slower Thunderbolt 3/4/PCIe3 connection (and affected by sharing if on a single Thunderbolt link). But in the big picture still fast, but not as fast as the internal Mac Studio SSDs.

What are you installing the M.2 drives in?

I have them installed in Sonnet Echo Express SEIIIe Thunderbolt 3 chassis and single PCIe slot to M.2 adapter cards (so that all switch/bifurcation support is provided by the Sonnet chassis PCIe switch and you can use any cheap/dumb PCIe3 to M.2 adapter card. It's chunky/large but nice for my needs. If you want the fastest possible aggregate IO you'll spread out M.2 drives in smaller Thunderbolt mounting packaging. Stay away from some low-cost cheaply designed M.2 enclosures that say only pass say a single or double PCIe lane to each M.2 card. Like the OWC Express 4M2.

A lot of thermal needs depends on use but I would use these drives with the factory heatsink option if there is space/internal blown air cooling (like that Sonnet chassis' great quiet but effective fan). Be careful of any case/packaging that does not have good passive conductive cooling with good thermal bonding from the M.2 to the case or a fan and vents.

And as always the first thing you do with any SSD drive is check its firmware is up to date.

Sorry to hijack, in my desperation i found several posts of yours with valuable information...

I probably need to rethink my setup, since i just ran into desaster.

Mainly for backup reasons i chose to have a dedicated Internal 1TB that should remain almost unaltered through the next years of production.

consequently i set up the following SSD array using 3x Icy Box IB-1817Ma-C31 enclosure containing V7 V7SSD2TBNV4E SSD M.2.


- SSD1 2TB dedicated to current production
-> connected directly through TB Port

- SSD2 2TB dedicated Backup of SSD1 that i backup manualy directly after the session through Carbon Copy Colone
-> connected directly through TB Port

- SSD3 2TB a dedicated Libraries Sample SSD that can grow with time
-> connected directly through TB Port

- a dedicated DropBox SSD (DropBox beeing replaced because of the silly Apple feature the installed now - thats another story...)
-> connected through a HUB

i do have the Chassis for my UAD PCIe Cards
one slot is still free
-->> should i install a PCIe to M.2 card?
-->> which one?

it showed, that the enclorsures /SSDs work as normal until for no apparent reason the disconnect fro the OS -> disk not properly ejected message

today i started my mac
i started protools and during use the external drive with the current PT session disconnected for no apparent reason. Since it is gone, doesn't show after reboot, not in the finder or HD-Utility,
it doesn't show when i put it in another enclosure, not in another mac either..

is there hope before dumping those M.2 enclousures and V7 SSDs?

for a fast solution i just bought two Samsung T7 2TB, maybe i can get some work done today





My Setup
Mac mini M2 Pro 2023
16GB RAM
1TB SSD
Ventura 13.3.1
Firefox 116.0.2
ProTools 23.6.0.110
ProTools Cache 12GB
3x Icy Box IB-1817Ma-C31 = enclosure
3x V7 V7SSD2TBNV4E = M.2 SSD

Sonnet Echo Express SEIIIe Thunderbolt 3 chassis

[Righty27]

Originally Posted by chris.d

it showed, that the enclosures /SSDs work as normal until for no apparent reason the disconnect fro the OS -> disk not properly ejected message

I'm far from an expert in these matters, however have been tracking this thread whilst benefitting from Darryl and Janne's experience/advice, as well as recently liaising with Sonnet tech support regarding their Echo Dual NVMe Dock, which I was considering.

However, this model lacks the performance benefits of their chassis/card solutions (with PCIe switch, explained above and elsewhere by Darryl) and appears to 'suffer' from the 'disconnect' messages that Chris raises, whenever the Mac sleeps or wakes, which Sonnet assure me is a Mac issue that affects external NVMe drives and can be ignored. Could this be what you're seeing?

Separately, having come across factors that do not affect me personally (e.g. apparently one shouldn't mix PCIe/NVMe cards with HDX, so these chassis solutions might often be single-purpose, unless video cards also are involved, I imagine) and considering the prevalence of Mac Studios that appear to be displacing potential Mac Pros (now that it's been released with the main benefit over the Studio being PCIe expansion), I imagine that for Sonnet to release a 'Quad' version of their Thunderbolt 3 NVMe Dock with an inbuilt 4 x 4 PCIe switch for Mac Studio owners only looking to expand storage, would be a slam dunk!

[sw rec]

Yes, 2 Samsung 980s on the cards Darryl recommends, in a Sonnet expansion chassis. Flawless and fast.