External multi-bay enclosure

[BobK]

I'll almost certainly be getting a Mac Studio, if not the initial release, then in a year or two.

The question is: what will I use for external storage?

I currently have six drives in a Hackintosh tower - system drive, bootable clone of the system drive, Time Machine drive, sound libraries drive, audio projects, and audio projects backup.

Three of these are HDDs, so it seems that the best solution is probably an OWC Thunderbay 8-drive enclosure.

I'm aware of the other OWC offerings, like Thunderblade, etc, but I'm wondering if there are other options I should consider. (I probably don't want to use a NAS.)

iMac and Mac mini users: what have you used for multi-bay external storage? Anything you'd recommend avoiding?

Thanks!

[jlaudon]

I got this for my MacBook Pro 2021 - the Nvme drives are more expensive, but the small size and smoking speed are amazing

https://www.owcdigital.com/products/express-4m2

[BobK]

As of this writing, a 1 TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVME blade (on sale for 15% off at Samsung’s site) is actually $10 less than an 870 EVO 2.5” drive at Amazon. So that enclosure is definitely worth considering for the future. Right now, though, all my SSDs are 2.5” and have a lot of life left in them. Thanks!

[mothra]

Im using one of the Oyen Mobius USB-C enclosures here. Its only 2 trays but they make a 5 tray version (which seems to be the only one you can find in stock now too). All of my drives are SATA SSD's so there was no point in spending 2-3x as much for a Thunderbolt case at the time. Its an actual USB 3.1 Gen 2 enclosure too so its 10Gpbs as opposed to the majority of the rest that are Gen 1 and 5Gbps.

[mikehalloran]

Why you would want to cripple the blazing speed of the new Studio by running anything from externals is something I don’t understand. Read page 4 of this thread.

https://www.motunation.com/forum/viewt ... 4&start=45

2800 is the fastest that any external can run connected to a Mac. It’s the maximum speed of the 4 Lane TB3 bus. One NVMe 3 x4 blade or 4 of them in a RAID 0 array or 8 SATA III SSDs or 16 HDDs… Maybe a future Thunderbolt 5 spec will change that but not this year. TB4 allows multiple TB3 devices on the same bus, daisychained or connected to a hub but does not make it faster.

Internal storage on any TB2 Mac with two blades is rated at 7000. Those with single blades inside (Mini, MBAir) are rated 3600. RAID 0 does not quite double the speed. All of the numbers I quote are theoretical maximums, the kind that only Marketing departments believe but they are useful for comparison.

HDDs are for Time Machine and archival storage anymore.

[BobK]

Already saw that thread. I'll keep active projects on the internal drive. Externals are for archived projects, backups, and sound libraries.

[dix]

Why you would want to cripple the blazing speed of the new Studio by running anything from externals is something I don’t understand. Read page 4 of this thread.

https://www.motunation.com/forum/viewt ... 4&start=45

In that thread you say keeping VIs on an external makes sense. Am I taking that out of context? - there's a lot of info spread across a few threads at this point. i may be confused

You also mention in that thread that projects on externals run slower. I know the numbers don't agree, but that is not my experience so far. I haven't tested extensively, but running projects from the internal integrated storage doesn't seem any different than running from an external SSD (Thunderbay 4 Mini) on a Tb4 bus on my MBP. I'm guessing the performance might vary greatly from project to project. I only did torture tests when I first got my MBP (dense MIDI note field redraws, audio renders etc. general snappiness), no real world work, but nothing I did made me think there was any big advantage to running projects from the internal storage. ...it's also possible there's something wonky with my setup that prevents me from reaping internal storage benefits, but everything seems smooth overall.

[Michael Canavan]

I currently have six drives in a Hackintosh tower - system drive, bootable clone of the system drive, Time Machine drive, sound libraries drive, audio projects, and audio projects backup.

Three of these are HDDs, so it seems that the best solution is probably an OWC Thunderbay 8-drive enclosure.

I'm aware of the other OWC offerings, like Thunderblade, etc, but I'm wondering if there are other options I should consider. (I probably don't want to use a NAS.)

If you're against NAS then the obvious choice is to hunker down and spend the money on this OWC monster.
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/thunder ... nderbolt-3

Besides the inevitable doubling of speed a similar device will have 5 years from now, I would think it would be pretty hard to go wrong with this.

I'm going to guinea pig myself to the next generation of NAS coming out personally. Everything is pointing to 1000MB/s throughput on the latest Qnap and Synology NAS setups, so I'm going to take the chance I can set up a portion as a DAS etc. Obviously DAS is always faster, but being able to access the entire thing while away from home is more than tempting for me.

[mikehalloran]

Why you would want to cripple the blazing speed of the new Studio by running anything from externals is something I don’t understand. Read page 4 of this thread.

https://www.motunation.com/forum/viewt ... 4&start=45

In that thread you say keeping VIs on an external makes sense. Am I taking that out of context? - there's a lot of info spread across a few threads at this point. i may be confused

You also mention in that thread that projects on externals run slower. I know the numbers don't agree, but that is not my experience so far. I haven't tested extensively, but running projects from the internal integrated storage doesn't seem any different than running from an external SSD (Thunderbay 4 Mini) on a Tb4 bus on my MBP. I'm guessing the performance might vary greatly from project to project. I only did torture tests when I first got my MBP (dense MIDI note field redraws, audio renders etc. general snappiness), no real world work, but nothing I did made me think there was any big advantage to running projects from the internal storage. ...it's also possible there's something wonky with my setup that prevents me from reaping internal storage benefits, but everything seems smooth overall.

My my 14 Core had only 2TB onboard and all my VIs were on external SSDs over Thunderbolt. I bought my 18 Core for the sole purpose of upgrading internal storage to 4TB.

Once loaded, VIs work ok when stored on fast enough externals but as Michael C. pointed out, the load times can leave you waiting—something I failed to mention. For that reason, Kontakt and SampleTank sit on my internal while the rest of my VIs sit outside. SampleTank sometimes needs to be refreshed before it will load: a few annoying minutes when the libraries are onboard; up to 20 when they were on the external.

You also mention in that thread that projects on externals run slower. I know the numbers don't agree, but that is not my experience so far.

That is exactly my experience and I was describing a project that I worked on last Friday. Although the DP project and the video were on the external, the VIs I used where hosted in SampleTank and internal. It was a 5 minute choir project with 27 vocal tracks. RX 7 Declick was used on 2, I changed the Limiter from MW to bx_limiter True Peak and Evantide SP1600 Reverb was used on the Master only. Once I realized what was going on, I decided to leave it on the external just to see how inconvenient it would be by comparison—a lot more than expected. Unlike current projects, that one was 48k/24.

Now that my curiosity has been satisfied, next time I'll bring my projects back in unless doing a few minor edits only.

I now work 48k/32bit float only which has made my projects with senior choirs much easier. Most of the tracks I get are from people singing into their smartphones held too close.

[dix]

You also mention in that thread that projects on externals run slower. I know the numbers don't agree, but that is not my experience so far.

That is exactly my experience and I was describing a project that I worked on last Friday. Although the DP project and the video were on the external, the VIs I used where hosted in SampleTank and internal....

Maybe we're using different terms. When I say "projects on externals", I mean just the DP Project folders (the document, Audio Folder, Undo Folder etc) reside on the external drive, just as you describe this project (my video and VIs are on externals too). So (again) for me, whether that DP Project folder resides on the internal integrated-storage or an external makes little or no difference.

[BobK]

If you're against NAS then the obvious choice is to hunker down and spend the money on this OWC monster.
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/thunder ... nderbolt-3

Yeah, I’ve seen that and it looks great, but for me it’s overkill. The Thunderbay 8 is probably the best fit.

I have a 2-bay Synology NAS, mainly for my music library, but I think I want to stick with DAS for the work stuff.

[nk_e]

If you're against NAS then the obvious choice is to hunker down and spend the money on this OWC monster.
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/thunder ... nderbolt-3

Yeah, I’ve seen that and it looks great, but for me it’s overkill. The Thunderbay 8 is probably the best fit.

I have a 2-bay Synology NAS, mainly for my music library, but I think I want to stick with DAS for the work stuff.

FWIW

I have a thunderbay 8. It’s quite noisy imho. The maximum recommended length of the TB cable meant it had to be relatively close to the machine. As I do a decent amount of voice over and narration work and I ended up turning it off when I had to record.

I bought one of those silly extended optical TB cables to put it about 20 feet tucked away in another part of the room. It didn’t make much difference and the connection proved unreliable.

I suppose I could switch out the fan, and you might want to consider that too. I just bit the bullet and went all SSD with one of these:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/produc ... cmultidock

It is completely noiseless. It has an independent SATA driver chip on each disk, and the rear panel features 2 USB‑C connections and a slide switch to allow selecting between using 4 disk slots on a single USB‑C connection, or 2 slots on each USB‑C connection.

It’s not as fast as external blade based solutions, but it’s plenty fast for most things.

Amazon has them for $595.

If you are really hell bent on a Thunderbay, I’ll sell you mine.

Good luck.

[BobK]

FWIW

I have a thunderbay 8. It’s quite noisy imho. The maximum recommended length of the TB cable meant it had to be relatively close to the machine. As I do a decent amount of voice over and narration work and I ended up turning it off when I had to record.

I bought one of those silly extended optical TB cables to put it about 20 feet tucked away in another part of the room. It didn’t make much difference and the connection proved unreliable.

I suppose I could switch out the fan, and you might want to consider that too. I just bit the bullet and went all SSD with one of these:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/produc ... cmultidock

It is completely noiseless. It has an independent SATA driver chip on each disk, and the rear panel features 2 USB‑C connections and a slide switch to allow selecting between using 4 disk slots on a single USB‑C connection, or 2 slots on each USB‑C connection.

It’s not as fast as external blade based solutions, but it’s plenty fast for most things.

Amazon has them for $595.

Thanks, nk_e!

I’ve read about the noise in the Thunderbay units. I wonder if switching to a Noctua fan might help (they’re higher-end (quieter) PC fans - there’s one in my Hackintosh), but that would be a pain.

But now I’m thinking of moving more stuff to SSDs and maybe just get a 2-bay HDD enclosure for archives.

The Blackmagic unit looks good, especially for hot-swapping. I don’t really need that, though, so a Thunderbay 4 mini would be fine and is less than half the cost ($249).

I’m also considering an OWC Express 4 M.2 which holds four NVMe blades, but I’m not sure if the speed increase is worth the cost at this point.

EDIT: There are many reports of the fans in these units being noisy, and apparently each drive gets one PCI lane, which means they don't perform to anywhere near their full potential - faster than SATA, but not by a lot.

[BobK]

running projects from the internal integrated storage doesn't seem any different than running from an external SSD (Thunderbay 4 Mini) on a Tb4 bus on my MBP. I'm guessing the performance might vary greatly from project to project. I only did torture tests when I first got my MBP (dense MIDI note field redraws, audio renders etc. general snappiness), no real world work, but nothing I did made me think there was any big advantage to running projects from the internal storage. ...it's also possible there's something wonky with my setup that prevents me from reaping internal storage benefits, but everything seems smooth overall.

How’s the fan noise on the Thunderbay 4 Mini?

A photo in a review from 2020 showed a Noctua fan, which is good. But earlier reviews show a different brand.

[dix]

running projects from the internal integrated storage doesn't seem any different than running from an external SSD (Thunderbay 4 Mini) on a Tb4 bus on my MBP. I'm guessing the performance might vary greatly from project to project. I only did torture tests when I first got my MBP (dense MIDI note field redraws, audio renders etc. general snappiness), no real world work, but nothing I did made me think there was any big advantage to running projects from the internal storage. ...it's also possible there's something wonky with my setup that prevents me from reaping internal storage benefits, but everything seems smooth overall.

How’s the fan noise on the Thunderbay 4 Mini?

A photo in a review from 2020 showed a Noctua fan, which is good. But earlier reviews show a different brand.

Super minimal, but not silent. I felt compelled to move it off the desktop, with my other drive-docks, onto the floor with my Time Machine spinners, where the noise from it is completly imperceptible.