ThunderBolt 3 -*Issues

[Zergei72]

As a pain in the ass I'm having performance issues with my external Lacie TB-3 Drive .

https://www.lacie.com/gb/en/products/mobile-drive/

I thought they were meant to be fast, but in this case even my WD Blue 1 TB SATA3 7200RPM 64 MB out performs it .

I get crackling in audio during playback and / or when I save a session during play or rec / when Pro Tools auto-saves . I'm recording @ 44100KHz, 32 Bit Float .

Pro Tools Artist version 2022.10.0 .

MSI Z390 A-Pro,
Intel i3*CPU
16Gb RAM
MSI GT 710 Graphics
MSI two port TB-3 add-on card

- Z -

[Darryl Ramm]

There is nothing Thunderbolt 3 at all about these drives besides the deceptive marketing from LaCie/Seagate. And with Seagates past reputation for compact HDD drive quality problems I have totally ignored the company. They are probably not alone with these deceptions.

The marketing claims of "compatible with Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4" mean these are neither, AFAIK they are all USB 3.1 Gen 1 SATA HDD, and since they don't mention RPM assume they will be 4,800 RPM or slower. Buried in spec sheets they clarify these are USB 3.1 Gen 1 drives, but seemingly are too embarrassed to include the RPM. These are all Seagate's way of pushing products from its dying disk business onto confused consumers. Toss them in the trash I would not even use them for backups.

I have posted on DUC in the past a lot about great SSD products from Samsung and Western Digital (and Sandisk).

Your best option with a PC with PCIe slots like you have is to use PCIe to M.2 adapter cards and the Samsung 980 Pro or WD Black SN850 series NVMe SSDs. If using more than one slot adapter cards make sure the are going into suitable slots and have bifurcation support if needed, or ask. Set up your system boot on one of those drives and if you have room on it also use it for your sessions. There is no need for a dedicated or external hard drive... except for backups/archives, and you can move sessions between other computers on a USB thumb drive.

[Farhoof]

These are disk with a fast connection interface but an old fashioned slow spinner disk inside. Reading or writing might even be ok-ish, but reading _and_ writing at the same time will be extremely slow, I'm guessing maybe 10-20 MB/s.
IMHO Seagate/Lacie should be avoided at all cost.

It's best to read some speed benchmarks for external storage. The usb or tb speed says nothing about the actual disk speed. I've found the Samsung T7 to be in good spot price/performance ratio.

[The Weed]

Darryl is, as always, correct and offering great advice. This is the adapter I got to install two Samsung Evo 970 Plus NVMe M.2 drives: https://www.ebay.com/itm/254628249542

The heat sink works very well. I did not use the RGB lights.

Looking at your brief specs, that i3 is underpowered for Pro Tools. The NVMe drive(s) would help and so would doing all the optimizations.